


the wild child, the ghost and the dropped son

by TobermorianSass



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Ableism, Character Study, Dubious Consent, Experimental Style, First Order Politics, First Order history sort of, Flashbacks, Galactic politics, Hux is Not Nice, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Kylo Ren Has Issues, M/M, Manipulation, Murder, Murder Boner, Murder Fantasy, Non-sexual Fantasies, Not Really Character Death, POV Kylo Ren, Sexual Content, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Unreliable Narrator, blurred narrative reality, death fantasies, implied/referenced dissociation, implied/referenced institutionalization for mental health issues, there is sex but it isn't sexy, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-07-22 08:47:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7428106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass/pseuds/TobermorianSass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was an art to being the man behind a mask, pulling something out of nothing to create a faceless symbol for everyone to hide behind. The trouble was, sometimes the parts they used to make him didn't fit back together, got all tangled up and confused, even when he tried to make it fit the facts: he was Darth Vader's grandson, he was a killer, he knew the Force. </p><p>And nobody, not even Snoke, not even the General could put him back together again. So they used him instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the wild child, the ghost and the dropped son

**Author's Note:**

> The title is derived from the opening lines of _[Vision and Prayer](https://allpoetry.com/Vision-And-Prayer)_ by Dylan Thomas. 
> 
> This fic was originally supposed to answer the question "Kylo Ren/Ben Solo: real person or abstract half-thought out concept" and then veered into "Kylo Ren treats Hux as his own personal murderous MPDG: discuss" and then acquired a plot somewhere halfway through this, so I'm very sorry for that. 
> 
> Big thank you to [Isy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/memorde) for doing the code for this fic's skin.
> 
> Please check the end notes for a more detailed (and partially spoilery) description/explanation of the warning tags if any of the tags concern you. Also, if you feel anything needs to be tagged please let me know!

_Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,_  
_Humpty Dumpty had a great fall._  
_All the king's horses and all the king's men_  
_Couldn't put Humpty together again._

 _-_ Humpy Dumpty, an old children's nursery rhyme

**i.**

There were lies and lies and lies.

No. Begin again.

There were three facts: he was Anakin Skywalker – Darth Vader’s – grandson, he had the Force and he could kill without compunction. And then there were lies. And truths. And lies-and-truths. And liesandtruths. And lies and lies and lies. They weren’t all the same, they just had to have the same name like he had different names. Someone had to have different names to make things easier. To understand. Read. Dissect. If he’d had to give them different names he’d call them by his names. Kylo Ren lies and Ben Solo lies and then nameless lies all glued up inbetween that weren’t Kylo Ren lies or Ben Solo lies but were all sticky and make his fingers and hands stick together and vaguely, somewhere, he understood that this made them gravity or dark matter. Shit that held the galaxy together.

Mom once said that – _part of growing up’s knowing when not to say what you really mean_.

“Why?” he’d asked her. He was seven and he didn’t know why they all made a fuss about not lying and then told each other lies all the time.

“Because you don’t want to hurt them,” she’d told him. “Or maybe you want to make them feel better.”

“Like a glue-stat,” he’d said.

“Yeah,” she’d replied. “Exactly like that.”

Dad always said: _it’s about knowing when to keep your mouth shut, kid. Don’t let it get you down, never figured it out myself._

Anyway, all of that was some kind of lie because Mom was the one with the secrets and Dad was the one who never said what he meant, or if he said it it always came out crooked so he never knew if it was a joke or if it was real, like _real_ real. Lies about lies, which was another kind of glue. It took him years to work that one out and he only figured it out in the end because Luke and Snoke were two sides of the same credit, because they were fond of telling him the same kind of lies: these grand sweeping statements about the galaxy and his place in it and the dance between the Force and all the billions of creatures creeping through the galaxy and his responsibilities and his powers that were total bantha shit because what kind of fragging power did he have over bastards like the General with their superweapons or the New Republic and their fleet, what good was the Force when everyone else was blasting each other out of the sky with blasters and laser cannons and superweapons?

The General’s favourite kind of lies were all about hurting him. If they’d gone swimming and he’d started drowning, the General was the kind of liar who would have caught his head and forced him under and then lied to Snoke about it afterwards and told him it was all his fault for being weak and stupid, not because the General was a cold-blooded murderer and killer but because the General was just that kind of liar and just that eager to see him go, which was why he couldn’t drown around the General because the General was waiting for him to do that.

The point was, he _was_ drowning. Or maybe he thought he was drowning. Or maybe it was that he felt like he thought he was drowning, like there was too much glue and he’d breathed in too much of it and his lungs were all sticking together: Kylo Ren lies and Ben Solo lies and Inbetween lies and everything else. Or maybe his head was just too full of people and that was why he couldn’t stick it out of the water, out of the lies, because he’d allowed too many people inside his head and that made it heavy, which made it sink, which made him weak and meant he needed more glue, more lies to fix it right. Or maybe he was fine and he thought this was what was happening to him because Snoke or Luke or Mom or Dad or he’d made the mistake of writing it into the glue sticking him together.  Or maybe he was fine and it was only because he’d overheard one of the officers telling the General: ‘he’s barvy, he’s got hawkbats for brains’: and the General had smiled and agreed and he’d thought, maybe, _yes_ , because people didn’t set fire to their hair in the middle of their rooms and start fire alarms on the ship, even if they’d shaved their heads.

They said all kinds of things about him in the officers’ lounge when they thought he wasn’t listening, but he was always listening. He was everywhere, all the time and he was always listening. Someone once told the General he ought to ‘frag the barvy out of that weirdo’ like he was some kind of animal that could be whipped into a sensible existence and the General had snorted and replied something along the lines of: _you can’t frag the barvy out of anyone_ and _I’m not classless_ , which showed that the General was a man of sense even if he was cruel and even if he’d only said it because no one ever wanted to frag someone who’d set his ship on fire just as well as fly it. Someone else thought it was space-rats. The space-rats made more sense than the hawkbats. They chewed through wires in ships if their pilots and astromechs weren’t careful. If there were space-rats in there eating away at him, it’d explain the glue and the ways things went _ping_! and the way he kept thinking he was drowning even though he was breathing okay: if there were space-rats or hawkbats in there, of course his head would be heavy, too heavy and of course he’d keep drowning because of it.  

His head didn’t feel heavy, though. It seemed like it would have been the first thing to change if he had hawkbats for brains instead of whatever brains were made of, or if there were more people than there should have been. Most days it felt like his head was a giant balloon filled with hot air: too dizzy and too bright and full of things that pulled him this way and that, all hot and cold inside his veins. Brains. Things Snoke had said and things Luke had said and things he’d made by putting what Snoke and Luke had said together and fusing them until they’d turned into something else entirely. If he mixed and matched all the things they’d told him he could come up with twelve different combinations, which meant twelve kinds of glues he’d created for himself to stick himself together. If he added in things the General said because the General wanted to needle him, that made twenty different kinds of glues to hold him together. No one knew the answer to his real question, though: if you stick a lie and a lie together and make it something else does it make it a truth? It seemed like the kind of question they should have been able to answer if they’d wanted to know why he had hawkbats inside his head instead of brains, so maybe they didn’t want to know at all.

Or they didn’t know like he didn’t know.

He fantasized about drowning instead. It was the most sensible thing he could have done because it was clean and neat and it didn’t set off the fire alarms on the _Finalizer_ which made it better and less messy than spending time trying to define and separate all the various strands of glue holding him. All that got him was sticky hands and lungs and everything. Drowning was neat. Clean. No one could see the drowning. Sticky hands left fingerprints and marks behind, drowned bodies disappeared. In his fantasy, the water was oily and sticky like the glue, thick and dark and closing in over his head as he tread water desperately to stay above the waves and then the General would come swimming up to him and he’d think ‘safe, safe, safe’ and the General would smile like a Loth-wolf before catching his head and forcing it under the waves until the dark, oily water flooded his lungs and all he could do was breathe the water, letting it rush in and fill his lungs, fill his nose, fill his brain, until all the light disappeared and everything went quiet.

The absence of sound was the most intoxicating part of the fantasy. There was a moment before the light disappeared where the sound shrunk down to a single searing laser-point before it disappeared entirely. Drowning did that. Drowning turned all the sound, all the lies and glue-stats and things and things, into the rushing of water and then roaring and muffled like being underwater and then loud and quiet and loud and quiet as he sank and rose, before the General forced him underneath and then total silence, total oblivion, total death. Drowning took all the hot air out of life.

Drowning was easy, because the General did the drowning for him and held him underwater until he choked and swallowed darkness and became darkness. Because the General twisted his hands in his hair and held him down though he struggled, though he clawed at the General’s hands and though he begged and screamed _let go, let go, let go_. Firm and businesslike and tender and soft. He’d noticed, of course. The General’s hands were always perfectly manicured and soft; senator-hands not soldier-hands. The General had never fought a single battle in his entire life. His hands would be soft, terribly soft in the same way his smile was terrible, dangerous and precise and full of carefully measured lies designed to inflict the greatest amount of pain with the slightest amount of effort, so different from the way everyone else dropped their lies like they dropped their letters like they dropped their pants and crawled into bed with each other all the time.

He crawled into the General’s bed too. It was the lie that did it for him: _you can’t frag the barvy out of someone_. It sounded like the kind of lie the General was fond of telling, things he knew he’d overhear that slid into his skin like a vibroscalpel: sharp and lethal. Which meant, the opposite must have been true and if drowning turned everything black and quiet, then fragging must do the same and if it was hard enough and wild enough, then maybe the fragging would make everything go blissfully silent the way water rushing into his lungs turned everything blissfully silent. Which meant there was a reason why the General kept his hands soft and manicured even though he killed, even though he was a killer, which meant the General’s hands were meant for this and if he couldn’t be drowned into silence, maybe he could be held down and have all the crazy slowly and meticulously fragged out of him.

The General would kill him, too.

The General didn’t. He slunk into the General’s rooms one night and licked, slowly, meticulously, hungrily, each and every single one of the General’s gloved fingers and begged him silently with just his large brown eyes ( _you’ve seen him without the mask?_ ... _I have_ … _Not much to send holovids home about_ … _Brown eyes, large brown eyes like a nerf-calf_ ... ) to do something, anything. The General didn’t, just coolly dragged him up by the scruff of his neck and pushed him outside his door, so the next time when he crawled back in he took off all his clothes and lay down in the General’s bed and when he came in, tried to will him into it again ( _not half bad, but crazy, absolutely nuts_ ). The General didn’t, again. Just pulled the sheets off him and pulled him off the bed on to his knees in a way that wasn’t sexy at all, just cold and matter of fact, before flinging his robes back in his face and making him dress. So the third time, he crawled back in and knelt down next to where the General was sitting and took his hand and held it to his cheek and made sure he tugged at the General’s gloves with his teeth and removed them before he sucked the General’s fingers slow and gentle and meaningful and then let them smear spit along his cheek and his chin before he let the begging seep into his eyes all large and nerf-like the way the General liked.

This time the General caught him by the wrists and pushed him back on to the bed.

“I’m not a nice person,” the General said, all cool and matter-of-fact, like _he_ could have turned back or left when the General was holding him there by his wrists,fingernails digging into the soft flesh underside of his wrists, deep enough it stung and deep enough he thought it might bleed if the General dug any deeper.

He latched onto a single stray thought: maybe if he fragged Hux hard enough - or if Hux fragged him hard enough - they’d crumble and collapse and disappear and he’d find the real whatever he was trapped underneath the wreckage: of the lies and half-lies and half-truths and all the glue in between.

So he said: “No, you kill people,” then added, self consciously. “Like me.”

He thought Hux would say _no_ , _not like me_ because Hux’s hands were soft and manicured and _his_ hands were rough and battle-ready and because Hux killed millions with a few words while he killed tens and hundreds with his lightsaber. Hux didn’t. Hux didn’t even frown, the corners of his mouth just twitched up in a grin or the beginning of a grin, the only proof that Hux had heard what he’d said. Proof that Hux thought they could have something similar, or maybe _he_ was getting it all wrong and he was the one who’d done all the thinking and the imagining that there could be something that made them like each other. There wasn’t anything Hux-like about him. Hux would have remembered what his mouth felt like, but every time he chased that memory it slipped away and all he thought was it didn’t hurt as much as it could have and it didn’t burn either, it just _was_ , but less distinct than being pushed on to his back, so hard the breath was knocked out of him, his robes being roughly pulled up and over his head and then his pants pulled down ruthlessly and the hand on his throat that held him there, down, not vicious and not gentle just _there_ and definitely not enough to drown him.

It wasn’t anything like drowning. Drowning was always wet and cold and the slick, oily water he imagined filling his lungs always bit the way Hux’s smile bit, sharp and savage and sideways-round. Real things that made him real when they bit at him, when they slithered and crawled against him, the way Hux’s mouth slid along his skin, the way Hux’s teeth grazed at his throat and made his heart leap too hard, made it want to be eaten, the way Hux slid his fingers into his mouth - and that was the thing. This wasn’t like drowning because drowning was cold and this was all white-light and heat and Hux - soft and dangerous like his hands and warm, not cold, but warm, too warm like the crackling fire that’d got the alarms on the _Finalizer_ going. Only this time nothing was burning. Hux didn’t burn him. Hux held him down with one hand on his throat and put the other one - fingers - in his mouth until they were wet and then Hux put one - two - three - fingers inside him and it was nothing like being drowned. Because drowning was nothing like the slip and slide of skin against skin, drowning was darkness and cold and this was light, too much light and then Hux hit just right and the glue began to melt away. Thin little distinct trickles - Kylo Ren lies and Ben Solo lies and Luke Skywalker lies and Snoke lies and Han Solo lies and Leia Organa lies and Hux lies and New Republic lies and First Order lies - that mingled and commingled and coalesced into a thick and gluey stream that flowed away, that left behind just flesh and bones and muscles and nerves, synapses and neurons firing wildly and Hux, Hux everywhere, skin soft and slick with sweat and fingers sticky with come digging into his thighs and breath, hot and damp, along his collarbone.

It wasn’t anything like drowning, but Hux still held him down and he thought: _maybe if he had a hand-torch he’d hold it to my head and burn all my hair away_ , as Hux’s fingernails dug into his hip and he felt it sting which meant there was blood - blood and the creaking of bone as Hux held him down and welded him together, or maybe Hux was breaking him apart or maybe Hux was doing nothing at all besides thrusting into him just right, unmeasured and feverish and nothing like the Hux who smiled, cold and calculating, or the Hux who pushed him underneath and held him until water flooded his lungs and drowned but he was Hux, a Hux, just not the one he thought Hux would be. And maybe he was that too, too many Rens and Bens and Jedi-Killers all rolled into one, refracted through the lenses people held up to him, all things and nothing at all.

Nothing at all. He should have felt scared at the thought. He didn’t. What he felt was Hux move his hand from his throat and then, instead, fingertips - warm and soft and treacherously gentle, but if he focused he could feel the little whorls and the ridges, fingerprints on his body - stroking gently at his throat, at his jaw, at his throat again and then pressure on his jugular without warning - pressure until he felt his lungs seize up and then suddenly nothing - sharp burning where Hux nipped - warm and damp along his collarbone, along his chest - and teeth, digging into his skin - and fingernails, back and digging into his thigh now - stinging - Hux mouthing indiscernible nothings into his flesh - breath - _no breath -_ uneven movement, too quick, too odd, inside him - Hux - _Hux_ \- come along his thighs and sticky fingers, sticky fingers spreading it - sticky glue - glue-fingers - fingerprints everywhere - and Hux smiling knife-edged into his chest - Hux’s hand, slick - slick, sticky fingers - too much heat and light and Hux - and Hux - and _Hux_ -

For a single blissful moment, everything went still and everything went white-burning-hot and everything went bright and everything disappeared and he _was_.

“Have you got it out of your system now?” the General asked him much later when they were done, running a single finger along the vertebrae of his spine and making him shiver as the warm and liquid feeling crystallized in strange and funny ways and the hawkbats were already sneaking back to roost inside him. The General said it in a way that made it sound like “so do you feel better now” and “do you feel any different” and “wasn’t I right about this”, that was just like him - infuriating and inscrutable because none of those things were the same at all.

The finger traced its way back up his spine and his fingers twitched convulsively in the sheets despite himself.

“You weren’t lying,” he said, instead. “When you said - you can’t frag the crazy out of people.”

He thought the General would say something smug like “I’m always right” or “didn’t your mother ever teach you not to eavesdrop on people”. Most people did. The General exuded it, like body warmth. The General _wanted_ to say it.

The General didn’t. The General drew his hand back, though and there was a rustling, like he was rearranging the pillows. But then the General wasn’t like most people. Most people kriffing pissed themselves every time he came near them while the General simply looked stolidly straight ahead. Inscrutable and kriffing insufferable.

“That’s what psytechs are for, Ren,” the General said, in the kind of voice people saved for very young children. The kind of voice - Organa - used to use on him.

“You frag droids?” he said flippantly. Deliberately. If it was a button he could press that could make the General do anything, anything at all that _meant_ something, that could be _his_ . It was the first lesson he’d ever learned as a kid learning how to fly starships. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Things stay in motion or stay stationary unless acted on by a force - the _Force_ , a force, forces, singular forces. Everything moves faster or slower if you push or pull hard enough.

The General didn’t obey any of those rules: their success, the galaxy, depended on the General’s unwillingness to obey those rules.

He rolled over on to his back and studied the General, slumped back on his pillows with his forearm draped across his eyes, chrono partially obscuring his profile.

“Psych evals,” the General said. Drawled. “And then they hold your hand and listen to you cry so you can go back out and kill.”

“Or schedule you for termination.”

“Or schedule you for termination.”

It wasn’t the kind of death he’d have chosen. There wasn’t anything intimate about it, nothing personal or present. That kind of death came from pulling levers and pressing buttons: bodies flung out of airlocks into deep space, or culled and slaughtered in factories like fatty nerfs. There were places he didn’t know about. First Order bases on unmapped planets scattered across the Unknown Regions where they raised Stormtroopers. And officers. And maybe there were planets where the failed experiments went and disappeared. Were incinerated. Bodies, because they weren’t people, that officers like the General casually condemned to their death with a single signature. Numbers. Failed experiments. Ben Solo was a failed experiment. Like the New Republic.

They were going to burn the New Republic. Annihilate it with a single beam fired through sub-hyperspace, the full force of a sun and its dark energy swallowed and regurgitated in a single death ray - physics broken for the sake of punishment, the price of failure. That was all it took to undo thirty years worth of galactic good-will and bridge-building and democracy and five years of civil war, of Organa and Solo and Skywalker’s work. There wouldn’t be any wreckage left to rebuild, when they were done. The General wasn’t the kind of man to leave any wreckage for them to put things back together. The General fixed problems by breaking them and then obliterating them. Disappearing them. Wreckage and all.

There was always wreckage left to rebuild with Ben Solo, with Kylo Ren. There was wreckage now, slowly crystallizing around him - lies slowly coagulating, sliding back into his ears, into his nose and mouth, into his lungs. They’d worked on him for thirty years, along with the New Republic, but the New Republic could be destroyed by a single death ray from their General’s superweapon and _he_ couldn’t be destroyed because Snoke had _uses_ for him, because Snoke was a liar trying to turn him into something else, because Snoke thought he was special, because Skywalker thought he was special, because he was meant to be special, because specialness was written into his genes. Another lie, written right into him. Anakin Skywalker’s grandson. Darth Vader’s grandson. Not a lie, but a fact, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from all the stories they told about him, about Darth Vader, about Anakin Skywalker, the way they made it all into one great big fragging lie.

No one would stop him if he gave them directions to steer the _FInalizer_ into the path of the beam when they finally fired it. They’d die for Supreme Leader and he’d die for himself and no one would question it except the General who made a point of questioning him. They’d just say it was all part of Snoke’s grand plan, the only way to bring the First Order into power. They couldn’t afford any other kind of lie. No one would stop him and it could be easy, as easy as being incinerated with another thirty year old stinking pile of carefully crafted black lies and white lies.

But that would have been cowardly and _Han Solo_ of him. All he could do was burn his hair again and go through the whole rigmarole again. The General wouldn’t be pleased. And all the while he’d hope that someone could break the laws of physics to make him right, make him real.

“Do you do them?” he asked the General. “Psytechs?”

“Everyone does them,” the General replied. It came out tired, like the General was old, like the General would have liked him to leave which wasn’t true because that smug and self-righteous warmth still radiated from the General’s body. “For the greater good. Or military regulations. Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t actually care as long as it gets the job done. The lads get their hands held and talk about guilt and how blood makes them squeamish and then the psytechs do their work and we all go back out to kill and everyone’s happy and no one destroys military equipment in a rage, or sets fire to their rooms, or injures their fellow ‘troopers or officers because they can’t handle their emotions. And _I_ keep this machine well-oiled and running and we fight, we push the Republic and disorder back a little further every day and we win this war.”

That was it. The real crux of it. But the General couldn’t be allowed to know that.

“So what did they tell you?”

He saw the corner of the General’s mouth twitch, just the slightest bit, and then crook upwards - barely, but there.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought it,” the General said. “Everyone has.”

“I’m not everyone,” he said, trying to sound like a distant memory of Organa, always wise and poised. It came out desperate and petulant. It plagued him constantly. A thorn in the side. He couldn’t be a terror if everything filtered through the wreckage and the glue and the stickiness in his lungs and came out wrong each time. And he was a terror. That was why he was here in the first place. The terror of the galaxy, lying in bed with one of the most terrifying men in the galaxy.

“Extremely assertive and self-confident, able to tolerate high stress levels and dangerous and unusual situations,” the General listed as though reciting the report. “A total lack of empathy, a cynical disregard for moral and ethical concerns coupled with an inability to feel remorse, an instrumental approach to interpersonal relations, a slight tendency towards sadism and a certain fondness for violence. A high likelihood that the subject has one of the many subtle variations of the antisocial personality group of disorders.”

“What does it mean?”

“I’m a psychopath,” the General replied. “You’ve thought it. Everyone has. Don’t bother pretending.”

“But they let you join the Order,” he said.

“I graduated at the top of my class. There never was any question about clearing me for military service. As I understand it,” the General said, lips curling derisively. “It makes me an asset to the Order. Good officers don’t waste time wringing their hands guiltily over killing Republic scum.”

There wasn’t anything accusatory about the way it was said, or the way the General’s mouth - eyes still obscured, still hidden, still fragging inscrutable - curved derisively, curved like the General relished the taste of the words, but the words still pointed at him accusatorily as though just speaking them into existence would make the blood start welling up in ugly patches on his hands. As though just speaking them into existence would bring the bodies clawing back out of their graves on a lonely planet, from the plains around some nameless Jedi temple. _Guilt_. _Guilt_. He didn’t feel guilt. He slept well at night. He didn’t feel guilt.

“You’ve never wrung your hands guiltily,” he said.

The corner of the General’s mouth twisted as though this was hilarious. A joke.  

“I could have strangled you,” the General replied.

“You wouldn’t have.”

The General shrugged carelessly. “I could kill you in your sleep. The Supreme Leader might even thank me for it.”

He thought about how the General had put his hand on his neck and choked him without warning, not enough to kill but enough to remind him that he was playing with all the dangerous things he was fond of playing with, or dreamt of playing with: deep water and vibroscalpels and fire. Death. And then he thought: _people who kill people know it isn’t that simple_.

They waited, for the blood to well up. For someone, dead and rotting, to come crawling round a corner, out of the grave and point a finger at them and say, _that’s the one_ . _He did it_. For the lies to disappear in smoke and the truth to come out when it was least wanted. Because it was always the truths that were the least wanted that had a way of slinking out through the rubble like Loth-rats, hungry and ugly and gnawing at bones and wires and all the things that kept people alive and moving, while the ones he wanted stayed hidden. Dissolved and strewn in scattered fragments of Basic, stuck to the Ben Solo lies and the Kylo Ren lies and every single fragging lie which, this was supposed to have answered. Or forced together in a way that made sense, instead of leaving him melting all over the General’s bed like the Death Star in the surreal paintings at that exhibition on Chandrila Organa had taken him to see when he was six.

“You haven’t killed,” he told the General, before the thoughts got dangerous and stickier and tried to drown him right here in the General’s bed.

The General’s mouth twitched back in a proper smile this time, cold and sharp. “You don’t know that.”

It was a lie. The General had never fought in a single battle in his life. This wasn’t a secret. But the General said it like it was certain, like there was a secret he didn’t know, like he’d skipped some crucial file, missed some crucial piece of information that explained why the General could smile like that. Some crucial _truth_. Everyone seemed to have them. Something they knew. Something real and tangible they could hold in their hands and some of them secret truths they held out of sight in tight, closed fists.

He didn’t. He didn’t know how many of his secrets were his and how many of them belonged to everyone else, stray secrets and lies he’d collected and hidden away in his fists because they could have belonged to him. He could make them belong to him. Or they made them belong to him. He wasn’t sure which way it worked, whether Ben Solo came first or Kylo Ren came first and if any of them were as real as they felt or if they were as ephemeral as the ashes at the bottom of his urn: hair he’d burnt in a fitful fantasy he’d latched onto in which Ben Solo burned and  burned and left behind something solid and real. Gold. Tangible. The fantasies always left something behind. The real world was empty and unsatisfying. All that had remained was the acrid smell of smoke that had lingered in his room for days, like the phantom of Ben Solo stuck to the floors and the walls. And the ashes which had mingled with all the other ashes, anyway, and left nothing for him, nothing at all. So, he stole from everyone else, secrets and lies that could have belonged to him but they’d forgotten to give to him. Or given to him and then forgotten they’d done, but he remembered. He kept every single one of them. Stuck them all over him because that was what lies were, weren’t they? Glue-stats. They fixed you up. Fixed you good.

The General’s face was still half-obscured by his hand. It struck him, just then, how little he knew about the General. He knew the story, the basics, the trivialities that everyone seemed to think was important: his homeworld, his parents, a rough sketch of his childhood and his successes at the Academy. A brief and sanctioned history of the General’s services to the First Order that had never quite explained why he’d risen from Lieutenant to General in the space of ten years. There were facts and nothing more, nothing that explained the leaps from one fact to another - fact: his father was the Commandant of the Academy, fact: the General graduated from the Academy at the top of his class but not as a member of the Commandant’s inner circle of cadets, fact: the General was going to destroy the New Republic with the harnessed power of a star, fact: the General could break the laws of physics if he tried, fact: the General had spent his childhood in exile on the Unknown Regions, fact: the General was the youngest highest ranking officer in the First Order, fact: the General had never done any active field service, fact: the General talked about cold-blooded murder like it was as natural as war. Fact after fact after fact. Truths. All of them, meaningless and intangible. Untouchable. Elusive, like the lies he tried to grasp and hold down so he could dissect them into something true and meaningful.

He thought, wildly, maybe he was wrong and maybe the General was as inscrutable as he imagined the General to be or worse, if this was all misdirection. He could go to sleep, next to him and then the next morning, never wake up. Or go to sleep and wake up and wonder why he’d ever believed the General. Sleep and realize there was no one there for the General to murder in the first place.

 

**\--**

 

**ii.**

He crawled out of the General’s bed, once he was sure the General was fast asleep. He went straight down to the bridge, stole himself a datapad and sliced into the Order’s records in search of the truth. It was the first thing he’d done when Snoke had sent him to the _Finalizer_ , nearly four years ago. The General was only The Colonel then, in a teal uniform that clashed horribly with his hair and a memorial to some Kaplan or the other engraved on the cuffs of his sleeves in silver. None of it had suited him. Or none of it suited the General now that he looked back. It was difficult to tell now. Now that the General wore a different uniform, it seemed to suit him better: but maybe that was the trick, wasn’t it? The past was a chimeric being, always twisting to meet the present, always slipping away. Or maybe that was the General himself. Or maybe, he’d just been listening to the Force for too long, long enough that he’d forgotten to bother with looking outside himself because he was, himself, as unstable and as ever-shifting as the lines of hyperspace.

Even then, the files had all been bland and matter-of-fact. The only difference between then and now was the title and the insignia and the encryptions, upgraded to reflect the General’s security clearances: high command only. Well he wasn’t high command, but he was the voice of Supreme Leader Snoke, the Supreme Leader’s right hand and the fearless, daunting leader of the Knights of Ren and all of this, every single bit of this, was his. Snoke had said as much and he’d watched a single nerve in the General’s temple twitch as though the General was skilled at hating, at treason and at biting down on all that hatred and treason like it was a bitter poison-pill.

“There are things that do not concern you, General,” the Supreme Leader had said. “Interests that are far beyond the capabilities - the understanding - of our army, that my apprentice is tasked with protecting - interests that come first, above our military concerns. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” the General had said, expressionlessly, which was when he’d understood how dangerous the General was, precisely. He’d tasted the General’s fury, metallic and bitter: suicide-pill and blood, coolly mixed together, a taste that lingered on his tongue long afterwards.

He thought: _Snoke doesn’t know_. He’d been wrong. Snoke knew, Snoke knew everything. Snoke had the measure of each and every single ‘trooper, officer and enlist in the First Order - Snoke knew - Snoke _knew_ and Snoke kept all his secrets to himself. Snoke told them all they needed to know and all they needed to know was enough to follow him; another one of their lies. First Order lies. Like New Republic lies, but less contradictory and less disparate. There was only one path. Only one lie and he walked down it and the General _slithered_ , bitter, metallic fury and something he couldn’t put  his finger on. Well the General had his interests and he had his and his interests trumped the General’s interests and his interests required him to know just what and why and how and whether the metallic, bitter taste in his mouth was enough to hang the General for treason or if all it was going to do was hang him instead.

The files were still the same, still the same list of names and places. Graduated at the top of his class from the Academy. A lieutenant in the military, served with distinction on FO-275 - the name they’d assigned the planet somewhere towards the Western Reaches, but still inside the Unknown Regions. A non-conflict zone. There was something about settlements and terraforming and First Order revenues and data analysis systems. A deployment on Daxam IV, shortly after, on what seemed like nothing more than a diplomatic mission to a group of crackpots - crackpots who’d - yes - just before Kylo Ren had been thrust violently into existence on the end of a lightsaber and surrounded by dead bodies. Another diplomatic mission to the Corporate Sector and the General leapfrogged from Lieutenant straight to Major. The liberation of Iktotch: not a field deployment, but a strategic campaign the General, then still a Major, had designed and had led them to victory against the odds and the Major had become a Colonel.

He knew how the story went from there. He’d been there for it. Watched the General ascend the First Order’s command chain: from commander of a mid-sized freighter to a full-sized Star Destroyer, the creation of Starkiller, the triumph in the Bormea Sector. None of it - the past - nothing suggested the General’s claims were true unless it meant he had to sift through each of these deployments to find the trail of blood, proof that the General was capable of personal, cold-blooded murder: the truth, the _truth_ , something to match the warmth and the dangerous softness of the man without his uniform, the man who choked him without warning while they had sex, to the General who smiled cold and hard, who killed hundreds and thousands with a single flourish of his hand. (Who would kill billions, if Starkiller went ahead as planned). Diplomacy, peace, liberation, war, none of them meant cold-blooded danger or the bitter, metallic taste of rage on his tongue; they were everyday business, wires and hyperdrive motivators that kept the First Order functioning and thriving and relentlessly pushing forward, across the Unknown Regions and into the Outer Rim and across the galaxy; and the General - there was nothing _everyday_ about the General.

It was possible it was a lie that the General had slipped into their conversation, while he was still half in a post-coital daze, the world still bright and hazy and in limbo between the drab ordinariness of the _Finalizer_ and another, invisible metaphysical world. Why? Well why not. They were on the same side of the war, but there were wars within wars and the General and he were on opposite sides of a secret unvoiced one. Why? An intimidation tactic. Psychological warfare. the General _slithered,_ after all. Slithered. Lied. Raged. The General exuded rage that _he’d_ never been able to summon from inside him though he had a bulleted and numbered list of reasons why he deserved to be angry, why he deserved to rage, why he _should_ rage - a list of lies that spanned thirty years of his life that were woven around him by everyone: his parents, the galaxy, the New Republic, Snoke, himself. But the General had rage and he had glue, sticky fingers and fantasies about drowning and total, utter silence. The General was dangerous. He was dangerous too, but in ways he didn’t fully understand but could grasp. The General was dangerous in ways that he understood and yet eluded him, which made him lethal, which made him fatal.

The psytech report was real. He found it among the General’s medical records; all clear, all superlative, all signs of dedication and a drive towards perfection, all signs of complete devotion to The Cause. The pride, the pinnacle of the Empire, revived and reborn and channelled through this one man. There really was no surprise that the General was the one they used in their films, in their recruitment drives, on their posters - Academy visits and speeches, stormtrooper training videos, motivational speeches to encourage them, victory speeches, speeches, every kind of fragging speech: everywhere he kriffing turned, the General’s face stared down at him, followed him down the empty echoing passages of the _Finalizer_ repeating First Order truisms and victories until he could recite the story of the liberation of Iktotch in his sleep, until the General’s voice existed solely in this form in his dreams, until he’d imagined the General pinning him down by his wrists and whispering the story in his ear while stroking him, while cursing the Republic, until he’d reached down himself and touched himself until he came, imagining the General holding him down and cursing the Republic’s various failures and praising the First Order’s victories, its dedication to order - its _lies_ , hissed Ben Solo’s withered corpse, its _lies_ , hissed Kylo Ren, who was above loyalties, above dedication to a military cause, to the past, who could do this because he was inviolable and the General wasn’t, the General wasn’t. The General was disposable, one face like all the other faces. A uniform, like all the other uniforms on all the other starships scattered across the Unknown Regions, scattered across the Outer Rim. All of them waiting, like Loth-wolves, for a sign to start their feeding.

Funny thing was, the General without his uniform didn’t feel anything like the psytech’s report said he was, as though the General without his uniform and the General in his uniform were two different men, two disparate entities. As though he could become two different people just by wearing his mask or removing his mask - but a mask, a mask was different from a uniform. His mask _meant_ \- things, myths, histories. Everyone had uniforms. Everyone wore the same uniforms - all the Generals wore the same uniforms, there was nothing - no secret history or story written into them, nothing that made them _them_ , nothing that could have made the General, the _General_ \- and yet, and yet, there was a crack, a fissure between the two halves of the General, one half which had a name and one half which was a title and both dissolved in a puff of air every time he held his hand out and tried to grasp them. And he thought: _too much, too much_. Too much of the Force and too much of an imagination and too many carefully-crafted fantasies and too much of a fondness for lies, because every square inch of him was woven with a million nucleotides and proteins that screamed the lie - a lie - the two-faced truths of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, the same way he was Ben Solo/Kylo Ren: two-fragging faced: atomized, pulverized, deliquesced.

The General wasn’t like him. The General wasn’t _like_ him. The General was a psychopath and psychopaths were consummate, skilled liars. The General had said so himself, or more or less meant it, the way it was said, with his eyes covered. The General was waiting for him to drown. The General was _waiting_ for him to drown. The General would drown him himself. The General _would_ drown him himself. The General _was_.

He downloaded all the files. The ones on each of the missions. The ones on the planets FO-275 and Daxam IV - long expositions on climate, population, geography, geology, resources and cost-benefit analyses on the question of colonization and occupation. The files - too many files - on the Corporate Sector, some of them sourced from the Imperial Archives - old trade agreements, old weapons contracts, old treaties - blackmail material? Mutual interests? _My interests_ , he thought.

“You are distracted,” Snoke said. “You've made no progress on finding Skywalker.”

“I’m -” he began. The denial dried up in his throat. There was no use. Snoke knew, Snoke _always_ knew - Snoke knew all the truths there were to be known about him.

He didn’t.

He was supposed to be finding Luke Skywalker, but the problem with _finding_ Luke Skywalker was twofold: one, Skywalker did not want to be found and two, Skywalker had never been _found_ in the first place. There was a third problem, unrelated to Skywalker, and the third problem was this: he had a name, but the name was not himself yet. The name was a thought and he was not that thought, could not understand whether he came first or the thought came first and if he couldn’t know if he came first or the thought came first, how could he find Skywalker, who was more thought than he was person - who had always been more thought than person, even when he’d been Ben Solo (another thought, though more often than not he’d been an _after_ thought, a third name tacked on to Leia Organa and Han Solo - _and oh yes, their son, Ben_.)

“Don’t _lie_ to me, Kylo Ren,” Snoke’s Holoimage leaned forward, pulling him back to the present. “Your mind is clouded by this preoccupation of yours.”

“Supreme Leader,” he said, barely above a whisper. “I believe it is necessary -”

“Tell me,” said Snoke, leaning back and steepling his fingers. His gaze - there was nothing natural about it, the way it felt as piercing as a blaster-bolt through the heart although Snoke was somewhere on the other side of the Unknown Regions. “Do you understand what we fight for?

“The galaxy. Order. Progress. To cure civilization of the disease of anarchy and disorder, injected by the Rebellion and spread by the Republic -”

“Words,” Snoke said dismissively. “But do you _understand_ what they mean?”

“Supreme Leader,” he began, again.

“Your mind is disorderly,” Snoke said. It was a statement. A fact. “Your thoughts are obsessive, disconnected, scattered. You direct them in the pursuit of Skywalker but let them scatter to chase after -”

The words slunk through his mind like an oily black snake, stealing stray thoughts and images and words. FO-275. Daxam IV. Sienar-Jaemus Systems.

“Yes,” Snoke - purred. Dangerous, like the General. “I see.”

The snake tightened. He tried - to pull away, to run - it was wrong. Wrong of him. Snoke’s dark eyes narrowed and he thought his ribs would crack, he would crack under the pressure, under that gaze.

“I will find Skywalker,” he said hastily, trying to draw Snoke’s attention away from - “I need to -”

“You need to _understand_ ,” said Snoke. The - thing - invisible thing - around his ribs tightened even further. “You think you need to understand - truths and lies - yes - you need to move _forward_ , but to move forward you must move _backward_ and learn the simple truths of _order_.”

He stared straight into the snake’s eyes and said: “yes.”

It was half a truth and Snoke knew. Snoke _knew_. Snoke _always_ knew.

“Very well.”

And just like that, Snoke was gone, the snake around his ribs, inside his mind, had disappeared and he was left alone in the comm-room of the _Finalizer_ with bruises blooming along his ribs and the twofold problem of Luke Skywalker (the General) and himself - and _himself_. And Snoke _knew_ which meant - _no_ _time_ \- that Snoke was _there_ and _watching_ , _watching, always watching_.

He had one half of the answer, or one half of the stepping stone to an answer: if he could crack the mystery of Skywalker, of the Skywalker who had never been _found_ in the first place, by cracking the mystery of the General, as enigmatic as Skywalker had been and less of a legend but more of a myth and an archetype - _poster-boy for the First Order_ , the older Admirals and Generals complained, _too fond of personal mythmaking_ \- then maybe he would know where to start looking for Skywalker and he would have an entire stepping stone towards Skywalker, wherever the kriff he was. That was why he needed - to know. Why he needed answers. _A disordered mind_ , Snoke had said, well Snoke was right because Snoke was always right, even when he was lying. _Order_ , said Snoke. He had to understand order, had to go backwards to go forwards like in dejarik, where sometimes people went backwards to go forwards, to capture crucial pieces, to protect crucial pieces, to save themselves, to force the enemy out, to win.

“You don’t know that,” the General had said, like there was a secret he wasn’t in on. He had the facts now. The bones. And just that. On some places in the Outer Rim they read futures in bones, tossed them in steel dishes and then read futures and claimed it was the Force that told them the future. The Force wasn’t that convenient. The Force was like him. Wild and sticky-fingered, like glue - there and not there. And facts, bones, were real and there. He studied them, he turned them over, one way and then the other.

 _FO-275. Daxam IV. The Corporate Sector. Graduated at the top of his class. Fit for action. Subject has a mild tendency towards psychopathy._ Facts, facts, facts and no answers, like himself, like _himself_ -

 

\--

 

**iii.**

 

 

They are on FO-275.

FO-275 is a barely habitable planet: the atmosphere is thin and the air barely fills his lungs when he breathes in. There is a sun, but the sun is weak and dying. Everything about this planet is weak and dying. He doesn’t know why they chose this planet as a place for their rebirth. It seems like a bad omen, but no one else seems to think so and this must just be a relic of his chaotic upbringing, he tells himself. A barbaric childhood filled with smugglers’ superstitions and senate rulings and Jedi sayings and Corellian myths and Alderaanian lullabies and absurd children's stories from Tatooine. It’s all nonsense. Life, the greatest mystery of life, of the Force, is that it came out of nothing. So will they.

The General - but the General is only a Lieutenant now and he tries to imagine it, but every time he tries he thinks of that dogsbody aboard the _Finalizer_. An immemorable human being, well-meaning and not very smart. The General is memorable. The General  _is_.

Begin again.

The General, still a General because he was and is and will always be, is soft in the dying early morning light that cascades along the sharp planes and angles of his neck, his collarbone, his shoulders, his chest. He wants to press a kiss right there, where the General’s collarbone dips into the hollow of his throat. He doesn’t. The General has killed someone.

“What are you?” he asks the General.

The General regards him through his long red eyelashes, “You’ve clearly got something on your mind. Something you want to say. Something you want.”

He wants, he wants so very much, too much. He wakes up at night, sometimes, shaking with a sense of wanting, of something lost, something in the darkness that disappears every time he reaches out for it. Something he does not quite know. Things that are half-formed phrases and half-formed shapes, that drift seamlessly in and out of his waking and dreaming world: half-formed thoughts like him, that he wants but cannot articulate. Only want. The General cannot know all these things. The General has killed someone. The General is waiting for him to drown.

“I want,” he says slowly. “I want.”

“But what do _you_ want?” the General asks him. He shifts uncomfortably under the inquiring gaze.

“Something real,” he says. “Something true.”

This is how he knows this is a dream, a fantasy, because the General’s head tilts back and he laughs delightedly at this. The General doesn’t laugh.  He’s never made the General laugh like this before. He’s never seen the General laugh like this, unrestrained and unabashedly delighted. He’s never seen _anyone_ laugh aboard the _Finalizer_. No one laughs during work hours. It’s not forbidden, but they’re too busy securing trade routes and liberating Outer Rim planets, building Starkiller and destroying New Republic starships to stop and find the time to laugh. They don’t laugh on the bridge or down in comms, not even in the corridors or repulsorlifts though he’s heard laughter sometimes in the mess, in the officer’s lounge, in the barracks, in their private quarters - all the places he doesn’t go aboard the _Finalizer_. Public, private, public, private, he thinks. They don’t laugh, but they smile the way the General smiles like they’re all fragging Loth-wolves out to bite each other’s throats out. This is how he knows this is a fantasy, himself or the Force, because the General only ever _smiles_ at him, though he’s heard him laughing in the officers’ lounge sometimes, because laughter is only shared with equals and the General and he are not equals.

The General knows this. He knows this. This is why the General smiles and never laughs, why he wears a mask. The General commands armies. He commands Snoke’s attention, affection, desire for power, the Force, everything. He is the First Order. The General is not. He is a thorn in the General’s side. The General would like to see him drown, except now where the General reaches out and places a single hand on his chest and it is warm and soft, manicured, and strong and much less slim than he’s imagined it before.

“I want to know the truth,” he says.

“The truth,” the General muses thoughtfully, at odds with the way his thumb moves in circles - _seductively_ , his brain supplies unhelpfully. “But lies make life so _comfortable_.”

His heart hammers against his chest. The words come too close, too close to what Organa had once told him when he was seven and he’d made someone cry because he hadn’t known anything but cruel and direct honesty and she’d said, _sometimes it’s kinder to lie or not say anything than it is to tell the truth_ , and he’d gone away wondering how many things they’d told him were lies and how many of them were meant to make him feel better and how many of them were meant to make them feel better - and if the General was saying it, then it had to be true and his discomfort is a sign of a flaw, a crack running down the centre of his being like the crystal in his lightsaber, like crystal like Jedi, _that’s how the saying goes, isn’t it_?

“Have you killed someone?” he asks bluntly, placing his hand over the General’s, before things can get dangerous, before the General suspects - before the General _knows_ \- before things can get more dangerous than they already are.

The General snorts and flops back on his back, one hand underneath his head, the other hand still in his, though now the General’s thumb is making circles on the inside of his palm, not his chest.

“On this rock?” the General says. “Who d’you think I’d kill? One of my fellow cadets, or maybe, oh, a defecting officer - an _engineer_ , someone from research and development? Really Ren, d’you think I began my career as something as drab as a loyalty officer in the FOSB?”

He winces. “I thought,” he says feebly. “I thought that -”

The General turns his head and raises a single eyebrow at him. Somehow this is more cutting than if, like they were on the _Finalizer_ , the General had been snide and cutting and said “really” or “no you didn’t” or “you _thought_ ” or any of the things he would have - should have - said if this was real.

“You’re looking in the wrong place,” says the General. He thinks _the Force_ , because this is too real, too touchable, too linear and revelatory to exist purely in his imagination. No one gives him answers and dreams and fantasies are always, like lies, half true. “Asking the wrong questions. Sometimes a rock is just a rock, even rocks with supercomputers and three hundred and fifty three intelligence analysts - forgive me, _data_ analysts - working day and night to keep this machine running, even nodes, especially nodes and especially nodes and their _sources_ -”

“What?” he says, which is softer than “what the frag are you talking about”. None of it makes sense. The words fit together, but they’re like him: fragmented and stuck together haphazardly, which is how he knows it’s all in his mind even if it is the Force.

The General takes his hand and holds it to his lips. There is the slightest flick of tongue, warm hot breath, lips, chapped lips against his skin.

“Find the source, you’ll find the truth,” the General says. “You’re smart enough. I trust you.”

 

He downloaded all the General’s emails: they only went back as far as his assignment to the _Finalizer_. He scoured their HoloNet for emails he’d sent that still linger behind in the network, in the inboxes of miscellaneous Admirals and Colonels and Lieutenants and Intelligence Officers. All he found was expense reports, tenders and communications concerning the building of Starkiller, the distribution of Star Destroyers and the deployment of troops, meetings and appointments, nothing personal, nothing human, no trail to follow, no trace of life, no trace of anything at all it could be a droid it could be a droid it could be a droid.

 

They are on an unnamed planet inside the rotting insides of a Star Destroyer and the General is seventeen, or should be seventeen but he can’t imagine the General with the puppy fat of youth, or ever looking awkward and gangly the way he had at seventeen, or anything like teenage boys do because the General is poised, perfect and immaculate and consistently, always, thirty four. Never in a cadet’s uniform - the ridiculous shorts and the ‘trooper armour, none of that - and never beset by the problems of teenage boyhood: the roiling inner strife that hasn’t quite left him alone, the awkwardness, the desperate need to please, to fit in, to assimilate, to hold your body together while its limbs, so loose, so unrestrained, have other ideas. He tries to picture it: the General, slimmer and with long, long legs and uncertain like a young nerf-calf trying to find its feet, a mouth that hasn’t been moulded into a permanent half-sneer, eyes that still betray emotion: a boy. All he sees is the General now, in his uniform, blank and inscrutable, unreadable except when he’s in the throes of an orgasm.

Again. There is a boy. He has red hair. He is not the General because he has a name. This is all wrong. He can’t touch this creature. There is a boy - red hair - and _still wrong_ . A boy, his wrists are too slim, they feel wrong in his hands. A boy, his legs don’t suit him. A boy, he holds himself too wrong, even though his hair is red. A boy, he wears his heart on his sleeves and the armband is a cadet’s armband - all _wrong, wrong, wrong_.

They are on an unnamed planet inside the rotting insides of a Star Destroyer and he tells himself the General is seventeen, but the General looks exactly the same as he does at thirty-four. The only difference is, the General’s stripped to the waist and there’s a hard twist to his mouth that he hasn’t seen the the General wear on the _Finalizer_ as the General haphazardly flings his uniform and the disassembled parts of a blaster-rifle into a bag at the foot of his bunk.

The dogsbody had graduated from here, top of his class. Someone had gone to the effort of telling him this about the dogsbody, probably in an attempt to impress the boy’s worth on him - but nobody’s ever bothered with impressing this crucial information on him where the General is concerned. It’s all part of the man, the myth, the General. You know or you don’t.

He doesn’t give the General a chance to open ( _control_ ) the conversation.

“Is that why you weren’t part of the Cadets?” he asks the General. “Your father’s - because you’d killed someone?”

“No one talks about the Cadets,” the General replies, without looking up from his packing. It comes out like 'you must be new here if you have to ask that question, _stupid'_. “All our exercises are simulated. No live-fire.”

He refuses to ask the obvious question about the whys and the wherefores of the live-fire ban. He _could_ ask it and he’d have _an_ answer, but it wouldn’t be _the_ one and it wouldn’t tell him _how_ the psytech’s report was true, or why the General was what he was and if there were any truths at all out there, anything tangible at all that could be found, anything that could explain Skywalker to him, explain himself to him.

“You know something,” he presses.

“I know plenty of things, Ren,” the General says, shutting his bag and leaning against the bunk’s frame. He thinks: _muscle_ . The General is all sinewy muscle and bone and he thinks, _of course, of course_. It’s all in the medical report. A one hundred per cent military regulation body, though he thinks that maybe the trail of red hair and that V aren’t strictly military regulation, or at least they don’t make him feel very military regulation, standing here and trying not to stare trying not to wonder how it’d feel under his fingers.

“You’re hiding something,” he says, modifying his earlier statement.

The General studies him in silence, head tilted slightly before turning away and pulling on an undershirt.

_Shoulders_ , he thinks. _Bones_. _Bones and muscle_.

“Come with me,” the General says, holding out his hand.

He takes it without stopping to think about how this could be a trap, how he could be a Loth-rat walking straight into a trap with his eyes wilfully squeezed shut, how the psytech’s report says ( _promises_ ): _psychopath_ , how he doesn’t know where this is - where they are - how he knows only roughly, how he doesn’t know the General, how he only knows the General is someone who is hard and dangerous and soft and dangerous but never safe, how there’s nobody around, how the General’s hand is warm and soft, how the General’s fingers entwine with his, how the General’s fingers are long and good, good for strangling.

They are on a desert planet and the air is cold and harsh and hurts the inside of his nose and there is no sand, coarse and rough underneath his boots, only silence and harsh rocky ground that hurts even through the thick soles of his boots. He wonders if the General’s overcoat, the one he wears draped over his shoulders on Starkiller, is no more than show, so that everyone knows where they fit in the grand scheme of things. There’s no sign of life anywhere, except for them and the remains of the Star Destroyer towering above them. They walk in silence like this, hand-in-hand, until the Star Destroyer is a hazy and indiscernible black mass on the horizon. Somehow, the sun doesn’t move. Maybe it’s too far away or dying for him to tell, because the General seems to know: he looks at his chrono once or twice and mutters something about _too slow_ . Either way, they keep on going until they reach a place where the desert - not sandy and alive like Tatooine and Jakku, but _dead_ , a _dead_ and _empty_ world - abruptly ends and falls away.

“There,” says the General, pointing at edge of the cliff.

The General lets go of his hand and if this is a trap, now is the time, the only time, it’s just a pity there’s no lake, no trough for him to accidentally stumble into so the General can hold his head down under the water until he stops fighting, until he goes still, until everything goes quiet and he is one with the Force, no longer divided, no longer fragmented.

He still walks to the edge of the cliff, exposed and vulnerable and the General safely hidden away in his blind spot where he cannot see him and where he cannot sense him. Has never sensed him. The General is a dead weight in the Force, an inscrutable and invisible presence that could be the wind, could be a man, could be anything if only he could use the Force to feel its shape. Force-forsaken, like this planet. This is what happens when you drill a man to believe the universe can be controlled and destroyed by the power of minds and machines: the Force disappears. They become machines. Droids. A new class of humans entirely. The future.

The floor of the desert falls away abruptly and the bottom of the cliff is far away, so very far away and so very bare and he thinks - _no_ -

“I killed him here,” the General whispers in his ear. “That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

He starts violently at the General’s voice, so close and so sudden. It’s only the arm that wraps around him, the warm, hard line of the body pressed against his back, that keeps him from falling and dying and he thinks - _trap_ -

“Who?” the word sticks in his mouth, comes out in two halves. “Who’d you kill?”

“Oh,” says the General airily. His breath is warm on his ear. “You know. One of the cadets. _The_ Cadets. It was terribly easy. He didn’t put up much of a fight. I don’t think he expected it at all - we were standing here like this -”

A hand rests on his hips.

“And he said ‘please stop’ and I said, ‘why, are you scared?’ and he went stiff, so he couldn’t have lied even he’d wanted to,” the General pauses. “I don’t know why he was one of the Cadets. He didn’t fight, at all you know. You’d think he’d think of using his body - elbows, feet, anything - but he just stood there and begged. But then father always had terrible taste in boys.”

His breath is warm, so warm, as it ghosts along his neck.

“What happened then?”

The General’s lips brush against his ear as he mouths his next words into his ear and he shivers. “He said ‘yes, damn you, yes I’m scared. You’re scaring me’ and I said ‘it’s only adrenaline, Kella, adrenaline’s good for you’ and then he says - no he begs, it’s fragging pitiful - ‘please stop, I’m scared Hux, pfask’s sake Hux, I’m scared let me go, you’re scaring me, stop it’, so -”

The hand on his hip slams into the small of his back without warning and the world goes bright white and disappears, narrows into a tiny point and there is no air, no air in his lungs, no heart in his chest, in his mouth - and rock crumbles underneath his feet and he’s slipping, slipping over the edge and it should have been drowning, it should have been drowning and he thinks - _liar_ -

“I pushed him,” the General breathes, right in his ear. “Right over the edge. It took him seventeen point five seconds to reach the bottom. I timed it. They said he’d died of a heart attack, not even a broken neck.”

He is still alive, held in place at the edge of the cliff by the General’s arm, wrapped around his waist. He is still alive and on the edge of a cliff and the General kisses his neck, just below his ear and he shivers, his whole being shivers, though stars he tries to stop the tell. It’s a dangerous business, a dangerous game being at someone else’s mercy and trusting them to make all the leaps for him because he can’t, he can’t, he can’t - and he thinks, _drowning_ , and water swirling over his head and two hands holding him down, holding him under, two hands sending him over the edge of the cliff, too many lies, too many thoughts, too many things and he thinks - _I’m already dead_ -

“Why?” it comes out all broken and ragged, like he’s only just stepped back from the brink of death himself even though he’s already dead. “Why’d you kill him?”

“Jealousy, I suppose. He was father’s favourite.”

The General throws his head back and laughs, long and terrifying. The sound is swept away by the cold harsh wind, swallowed up by that dead, dead world.

“He was weak,” the General says eventually. “He was weak and scared, so I killed him. He shouldn’t have been scared, I would have held him, you know? Same way I held you. But he was scared and I could _smell_ it, so I killed him.”

The General steps back and he realizes how stiffly he’s been holding himself all this while.

“You did that too,” the General says. “I read your files. You’re all the same, you know - force-users. Breathtakingly arrogant. I worked with another one of your Knights once and he was just like you - always assumed he was the kriffing centre of the universe, too high and mighty and sanctimonious about his ‘higher concerns’ and ‘things you wouldn’t understand’ and he always made the same damn mistakes each damn time because he was too busy admiring how himself and preening and mumbling about the Force and us poor, stupid deadweights. Nearly lost us every single battle because he was so busy using the _Force_ he couldn’t pay attention to instructions. Or didn’t want to follow them because rules were made for us lesser folk, not for him, never for him. That kind of arrogant bantha shit, every fragging hour of the fragging day. You’ll go the same way if you’re not careful, thinking you’re the only one who knows how to feed on fear. It’ll kill you. But then you’re dead already, aren’t you?”

 

“That old story - he told you that? I’m not surprised, but it’s a story - just that, a story - you know that, don’t you? Or, okay… alright the kid died that year, but it was an accident during a live-fire exercise, blaster shot to the stomach… yes that’s the official story, you’ll have to ask him for the unofficial one if you’re so keen on knowing how it happened. … What? … No… He told you that? Well he’s lying. … Yeah he was top of his class alright, he was top of the Cadets too. His father’s favourite. … How do I know? … Stars, I was there, I was there. None of us could ever keep up with him. Stars, there was never any doubt he was his father’s favourite…”

 

They’re in a gambling den on Bastatha and the General is still a Lieutenant, but it’s wrong, it’s still all wrong. Everything is bright and gaudy and gilted and stinks of wealth, the kind of wealth people come here to lose casually over a game of sabacc while trading secrets, lives and deaths and planetary systems - all bought and sold over drinks and cards. This is a different kind of congregation of galactic scum. The very worst gathers in cantinas and the most dangerous gather on Bastatha in this gambling den and casually drop fortunes to disguise the fact that this is all business, business as usual. And the absolute pits all congregate on Sibesko which is where - Organa - after - yes. It all boils down to this: the General both belongs and does not belong here. They are not _scum_ , though they are dangerous, the most dangerous men in the galaxy though no one in the room knows it just yet (they will, they will, they will wish they didn’t). And besides, the uniform would be too dangerous, too many cards on the table and the General isn’t here to fling all his cards down on the table and give himself away. He’ll do that later.

The New Republic and Starkiller comes much later.

The General is in mufti. His hair is slicked back and red, dangerously red, and the General is wearing a dark tunic and pants that are virtually indistinguishable from his uniform now, except for the missing armband and the way the buckles and buttons are all wrong, too subtle, and the barely noticeable gold patterning, neat and geometrical like the General. It’s all wrong too, because the General is playing sabacc and drinking something - brandy or whisky - from a cut glass tumbler. The First Order doesn’t - they don’t - the General leans over and murmurs something in the ear of the woman sitting next to him and that’s strange, out of place and out of character, too - she’s old enough to be the General’s mother: her dark curls are greying and she must have been beautiful once, but she’s old, _old_ \- but she smiles at the General before the General makes his way to the bar.

The General doesn’t stop at the bar, at a safe distance where he can study him and ponder what _this_ means and how order and discipline fits into this, into any of this when he knows that seven years later they'll bomb the Senate, they’ll murder Senator Tai-Lin in broad daylight and then - _and then_ \- _the grand finale_ in which everything goes, every single fragging last molecule of it goes - and all of it, every single second of it, only throws the galaxy further into chaos - until they step in - and there are lies and lies and lies and half-truths and half-lies and the General is a killer and a liar except this is all wrong, this is all inside his head - this is the _Force_ and if the _Force_ does this too - or else, or _else_ \- it’s him twisting the Force all wrong, making it ugly and broken and half-falling apart because he can’t let it flow through him, because he clings too tight, because he tries and he tries too hard, because he can’t let go because letting go was what Skywalker did and he is _not_ Skywalker, he’s him, he’s him, he’s _him_. And life goes on irrespective and the General doesn’t stop at the bar: the General doesn’t follow the rules the Force lays down, doesn’t follow the rules of physics or any of the rules that govern people and the things people do to each other or even the rules that govern planets and their leaders. The General simply orders his drink and then slides in next to him where he’s sitting and begins without preamble.

“You want to know about my father.”

It’s all there on their HoloNet for him to read, it’s all public knowledge. Commandant Brendol Hux, father of the up and coming young General - the man responsible for raising a generation of officers and ‘troopers almost singlehandedly from scratch in the wake of the destruction of the Empire. Architect of the First Order in many ways, the man feeding their canons and fleshing out their ranks, the man who is also the General’s father. These are all facts and none of them say anything about either the Commandant or the General, nothing that makes them father and son or anything except two officers, two anonymous uniforms. Man and myth, myth and man. The closer he gets, the more it seems like all there is is myth and no man at all, just an empty space in the Force.

“I want to know why you lied,” he replies.

“You want to know why I said my father had terrible taste in boys.”

The little sound of frustration escapes him before he can stop it, before he can hide all his cards away. He might as well flash them all at the General and let him see and the General, he can see, knows it too. The General grins at him, amused and fragging poised and sophisticated and discreetly part of the surroundings which is the point, he supposes, of being in mufti and doing _business_ out in public. Of this _place_.

“You’re very transparent,” the General says, like it’s an immutable and indisputable fact. “Thank the stars you’re not working for us.”

“But I am,” he replies, before he realizes that this is the past and he must be - sixteen. Just sixteen. “I will. Eventually.”

“Not intelligence,” the General’s grin widens into an unpleasant smile. “The boys would eat you alive.”

He has secrets the General doesn’t know and will never know. Clearance, military clearance and access to secrets the General will never know and never have. The boys can't eat him. The boys don't dare eat him.

“Tell me the story,” he says. He can keep his cards close. He can.

“The story is terribly simple,” the General moves closer. Much too close. Their knees are nearly touching and he has to force himself to keep his hands still, instead of fidgeting. “Nowhere as lurid as you’ve undoubtedly made it: a middle-aged man surrounded by teenage boys, the kind of story your New Republic holorags would go gaga for. Perverted Middle Aged Man Preys On Vulnerable Youth: The First Order’s Shocking Truth Revealed. I bet your mother would _love_ it. They’d be flocking to her in droves: moral puritans and ideologues and bleeding hearts, eagerly drinking up every single damn story about how their enemy, the evil, dark bogeyman lingering on the edge of the galaxy is a fragging sexual deviant.”

The General takes a sip from his drink, then continues.

“But no, it’s nowhere that interesting. The actual story’s frankly quite boring compared to whatever you’ve cooked up in your silly head.”

He doesn’t start when he feels the General’s foot slide against his calf, all bone and all warmth, but he tenses up and then curses himself for being such a _child_.

“You’ve heard about the cadets,” again, a fact the General’s tone brooks no argument. “The Empire didn’t like it, said he was encouraging personal loyalties. Well, Father revived it and because he was top of the food chain this time around, no one told him no. Now, the principle was sound enough: pick the smartest, the top of their class and send them to pick off the weakest in their classes - evolution in action, active evolution; I forget what he called it - and when that was done, discipline them, teach them loyalty, teach them the principles of order, teach them history, teach them anger, teach them how to hate the New Republic and love the First Order and how to hate themselves and love the First Order. _Self-preservation_ , he used to say, _but a time will come when you will be faced with a choice - yourself or the First Order - and you will always,_ always _choose the Order_ \- Admiral Piett, Commander Ree, were to be our examples - not Tarkin, Father loathed Tarkin, it was all very personal - ancient vendettas and all that - but Piett and Ree’s tragic deaths: they were admirable and we were all meant to aspire to that. He never liked being argued with on that point and every year there was always some smartass who tried to argue with him and every year, that smartass would be the one to get picked off by the new Cadets. They never fragging learnt - here, you need a drink.”

The General waves for the bartender, a loose and graceful movement that is also effortlessly imperious - an art he should have perfected as a child, but had only ever managed to make crude and petulant. It wins the General the bartender’s immediate attention.

“I hope you’ve got a good head for drink,” the General tells him, turning back to him. “I won’t have you destroying my hard work because you’re blazingly drunk.”

“I can hold my drink,” he says.

The drink he’s handed is a pale and sickly green. Deathly green. The cliff is still vivid in his mind, the harrowing sensation of a fall and having the breath knocked out of him. This isn’t a cliff, but it could be - _trap_.

“Bottoms up,” says the General and holds out his glass.

He doesn’t have a chance. He clinks his glass against the General’s and drinks while the General watches, toying with his glass instead of drinking.

He drinks - all the way.

The General grins, takes a long swig of his drink and leans in even closer. “Here’s the thing though, my father had some funny ideas about how to pick us. We had to be smart, yes - and tough, but crucially, he believed that the truly superior human was superior in _every way_ and that meant looks and bodies, perfect symmetry, perfect bone structure, musculature, proportions - everything. You’d have never made it, for example. You’re too ugly: uneven, you know? Half put-together, half incomplete. He’d have never looked at you twice. He thought anything less than total perfection was a sign of genetic defects which in turn meant personality and character defects that could only ever be mitigated, never truly eradicated, so, totally unacceptable for the future and the leadership of the First Order - which, for all we know he might have been on to something - it isn't as though ah, you've proved him wrong in any of these particulars since you’ve joined us, quite the opposite in fact, if at all you've been very um, defective.”

The General’s smile is a cold and bright and terrifying thing.

“But what makes it tru-ly hi-lar-ious,” the General drawls, drawing out his vowels - _drunk_. “Is the number of people he managed to infuriate, the number of cadets who did silly things - surgery, synthskin patches to hide acne, ridiculous stuff like that - just to impress father, when quite frankly they’d have been better off expending their energy elsewhere.”

Impossibly, the General leans closer and fingers the frayed edges of his sleeves, then up, up - his cowl - and fingers curl in his robes - the room is swimming, the patterns on the pillars swirling and dilating - and the General’s fingers are long and bony and warm, warm, warm, burning - maybe fire - no but he isn’t - and then voice - the General - whispering - hot - in his ear.

“You see, there’d be enough people who’d find you, um, quite attractive. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, taste is subjective and any number of other cliches concerning this subject you’d like to include here. It was an absolute waste of their time. Meanwhile father was busy indulging his fantasy of creating the perfect, the ultimate _human_ . Breed us together, eliminate the worst of our genetic defects through artificial selection and then breed our children, until he had the perfect human - perfectly strong, perfectly intelligent and perfect for slapping their faces on posters, the future faces of the Empire. _Super_ humans.”

The room wobbles dangerously and he can _feel_ his nerves firing, synapses on fire and he thinks - _drink_ \- _trap_ -

“Anyway,” says the General, leaning back, though his fingers remains curled in the robe’s cowl. “The problem was Father was fond of Hert Kella - Hert never questioned orders, he was that kind of person, and he was good-looking, very good-looking - holodrama actor good looking, but he wasn’t very smart, he wasn’t as smart as the rest of us at all. Well I wasn’t going to stand for being treated like a breeding-shire, second-class meat by my own father. So, naturally, I made my displeasure known. It didn’t go down very well at all.”

He thinks - words - pillars twisting and turning, writhing - snakes, no leaves, just leaves - the General’s face, there but not there - letters, letters and sentences -

“You,” he says. The word feels wrong and unnatural, like someone else is sitting in his body and talking but he lets it all out because it feels right. “You killed him because he looked nice and your father thought you were a nice hunk of nerf and he was a prize-shire and you didn’t like it.”

The General’s look is - fond - he thinks, mind wrapping around the word eventually. Like the General likes him. He feels his mouth moving, the words tumbling out as he addresses the glass - the one with a face just like his, only fragmented into a million different constantly shifting strange triangular kaleidoscopic shapes that’s making him cross-eyed.

“I wouldn’t _quite_ put it like that,” says the General. “But essentially, yes.”

He - tries - the words come out wrong, again.

“That’s not very nice.”

“No,” the General agrees. “But then, I’m not a nice man.”

The room - swims - he feels his eyes open and shut, registers that he is him, blinking - the lights are very pretty, bright and twinkling in their glass chandelier - very old, nothing like Hosnian Prime - everything is golden and bright and beautiful, - and then the General’s hands are patting him, gentle and - businesslike - not patting - one hand in his hair gently pushing his head towards the bar - which is dark brown, not gold like the rest of the room and it eats the light, the light disappears into it - _like me_ , he tells the General - but it doesn’t fully disappear it stays - _like me_ , he tells the General again, _the light keeps coming out_ \- and a tiny little voice insistently nagging - _drink, drink, drink_ -

“My drink,” he says. “You.”

“Yes,” says the General. “Me. Don’t worry, Ren, you’ve held your drink marvellously. Most humans can’t handle a Cassandra Sunrise, especially not one spiked with spice.”

The last thing he remembers before his head slides down on to the bar and the light fully disappears is the General pressing a kiss to the top of his head and murmuring: _good luck figuring out the truth when you wake up, sweetheart_.

 

One step forward, two back:

  * there was no record of the General ever having visited Bastatha - lie
  * a retrieved holorecording of a lecture on eugenics by Brendol Hux proved illuminating - lie
  * there were no records of Arliz Hadrassian having ever been stationed anywhere except Daxam IV - lie
  * Hert Kella  had been bottom of his class - lie
  * the penalty for an officer found in possession of spice was instant expulsion from service - lie
  * the General did not play Sabacc - ?
  * he’s not the General’s sweetheart



 

Another nameless desert planet in the Unknown Regions. There are too many desert planets in the Unknown Regions and too many of those desert planets are under their thumb, as though the harsh and empty worlds of unexplored territory suit some perverse desire for discipline, for harshness that pervades the ranks of the First Order, except for where it isn’t harsh and empty. There is a slim, tall blonde woman with a familiar face, in a gown - First Order colours in slashes down the gown that look like death and dying and the blood of billions - that covers her feet, but leaves her arms bare. Her hair is scraped into an elaborate and impressive bun, held in place with a jewelled comb that matches the dress she’s wearing. Black and red, red and black - like the jewels glittering at her throat, like death, like the First Order. The General’s arm is around her waist and they are smiling and there are people - people surrounding them, shaking their hands. TIEs whizz past them overhead. Too many TIEs. He wracks his brain, trying to remember who she is and where he’s seen her before until the memory clicks into place: Hedy Ristal, heiress to the Sienar-Jaemus Fleet Systems fortune. Or lack of fortune. She smiles at the General and the General smiles and then leans in and kisses her and he thinks _oh_ , because of course, the General does his duty, the General is a man in a uniform doing his job and he, he was never part of the General’s job, but this woman is and this woman is like the General: sharp edged and inscrutable, less of a woman and more of a myth, the kind of woman artists paint and then hang on walls, with her large grey eyes framed by long dark lashes looking down benevolently on the rich and the dangerous, beautiful and dangerous and put together and every inch of her a statement while he, he’s only a statement by accident, because someone else put the words into his mouth, because he learnt how to read, because he learnt a fact. A fact, a single fact. Grandson of Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader. He has death in his blood and he doesn’t fully understand the whys and wherefores or why the darkness won’t come to him, she wears death on her dress and is at home in it and her lashes are so so very dark and long and _fake_.

He’s not in love. He’s not the General’s sweetheart. But he _is_ a fake, in the same way the General is a fake and the Sienar-Jaemus heiress is a fake: the way they’re all more myth than man, more lies than truth, unreadable even when presented with the facts.

And what are the facts? Hedy Ristal is three or four years older than him. There is a title, somewhere in her family, a barony, something more. The Empire handed her family the remains of Sienar Fleet Systems when the Banking Clan went bankrupt, in return for her father’s service as an Admiral in the Republic, then Imperial navy. Her brother makes historical films about the age of Empire, and on the side he films propaganda films for the First Order. Her mother is a Centrist Senator, representing one of the planets in the Corporate Sector and believes the galaxy must be united under a single, strong leadership if intergalactic trade is to thrive. Crucially, _she_ \- Hedy Ristal - runs all of Sienar-Jaemus’ operations singlehandedly and their ships, their TIE fighters, their reactor cores all come from Sienar-Jaemus. No one likes the New Republic’s position on trade with the First Order. The First Order has credits and a fleet that needs weapons, ships, hyperdrives, reactor cores. The New Republic does not. The mathematics of profit and loss are very, very simple. The Corporate Sector companies all flock to the Unknown Regions so they can continue selling their weapons, ships, hyperdrives and reactor cores to them. Ben Solo knows all these facts. Kylo Ren does not. Should not. Ought not. These are facts. None of them change the present or render the truth transparent. Another fact: the Senate is still old-fashioned about husbands and wives testifying against each other and the fastest way to start a shell company in the Unknown Regions is to have your client build it for you. A wedding gift, a child: a new order.

They are alone in their apartments, sparse and minimalist, which is a polite way of saying: hastily contrived to house the happy couple, hastily pulled out of thin air and hastily turned into something that passes for Imperial chic but is only proof of their desperation, of her desperation and his desperation to cement this tenuous connection - credits and profit and the future of galaxy, all contained in the sparkling promise-ring on her finger. The process is as solemn and meticulous as trade negotiations. The General shrugs off his greatcoat. There are drinks, brought to them by a droid. Ristal removes her comb and unpins her hair so it falls down her back in luxuriant waves. More talk, all about profits and losses and then Ristal throws her head back and laughs, long, elegantly shaped fingers idly toying with one of the buttons on the General’s uniform, at something the General says. They talk about physics, dark energy and oscillators. By the time she heads towards her dressing room, they have sentenced the New Republic to death and determined how they will execute it for its crimes against the galaxy.

He is invisible. He follows the General into Ristal’s dressing room and watches the General watch her as she slips off her bracelets, then her necklace and then shakes her hair out again before she begins to brush - one stroke, two strokes - three - one hundred strokes, all even and precisely spaced out the way - no - yes - used to. The General moves to stand behind her, slightly to her left and then gently gathers her hair in his hands, pushes it over her left shoulder and bends down and presses a kiss to her shoulder. He is twenty-one - seventeen - eight, in the wrong place at the wrong time, always looking in on things he shouldn’t be looking in on and hearing things he shouldn’t be hearing like the time - yes and - him - mentioned his name and then - she - said “I’m worried, isn’t that enough for you?” and - no - said “I don’t understand, get that into your thick head Your _Highness_ ” and she said “you don’t know anything” and then “you can’t even look at him without seeing Vader, you haven’t looked at _me_ without seeing Vader” and then yelling and then the door - and though he tries, star he tries, to back away, move his feet, move his hands, move any part of him away, away, before they can see - he can’t - and then the General looks up in the mirror and their eyes meet: all three of them. Ristal, the General, him. He thinks - _run_ \- but his feet are lead and his hands are shaking like the leaves in the trees in autumn, just before they fall away and die. The General smiles, reveals the rope in his hands. Kisses her neck, watches him in the mirror. Her eyes flutter shut and she smiles, serene. Dangerous. Omniscient as though she knows what comes next. She looks at him in the mirror and her lips pull back in a smile that makes him strain against - the _Force_ \- against himself, so he can run run run far away from this. Before he can find out what comes next, but it comes, it comes anyway. There is a rope around her neck, both ends in the General’s hands. She smiles, the General smiles. At her, at him, at both of them. He tries to break the mirror, break the spell, break this before it begins. Ends. Dies.

The General twists the rope and the breath is knocked out of his lungs. She doesn’t move. Her eyes bulge, like fish eyes, his eyes feel as though they’re about to pop out of his skull. Her mouth opens and she makes a wordless sound, he rasps, the sound rattles funnily in his throat, gasps for breath, tries to force air into his lungs. One single elegant hand - promise ring glittering absurdly in the artificial room light - reaches for the rope around her neck, then falls. He scrabbles at the invisible rope with both his hands, desperate. She kicks wildly, his knees crack unpleasantly as he falls to the floor and there are stars everywhere and they explode and fall into themselves and turn black and the blackness is the blackness of black holes and the blackness is eating everything and then the General says:

“ _What do you want_?”

And he rasps and his lungs are empty, empty of all the right things but full of burning and full in the way that emptiness fills places that need to be filled.

“ _Look at me_ ,” snaps the General and his head is jerked upwards and the General is standing over him, fury blazing in his eyes. The chair is empty. There are no jewels, no haircomb, no hairbrush. There is no body. Just them, just them and a mirror and a dazzling promise-ring on his finger instead of hers, him dying and the General behind him, twisting the rope around his neck even harder - he sees, before it goes black for three seconds - one, two, three - and he comes back and he feels his lips moving, his tongue moving up and down inside his mouth - at the top of his teeth, bottom, roof of his mouth, teeth again -

“ _The truth_ ,” he hears himself say.

The General laughs and twists the rope around his neck until he thinks his neck might break - the General keeps on laughing, long, too long and then says, no you don’t, you don’t want the truth, no one wants the truth, but here’s the story since you keep asking, I marry her, she marries me, she thinks she might rule the galaxy but the truth of the matter is, I don’t do very well with sharing my things, I won’t let her rule with me, or me, for that matter, so I strangle her and she dies. Her father is dead - Endor, everyone died at Endor, everyone with the slightest sense of honour died at Endor, which you know what that makes all of us: rats, Loth-rats, space rats, every single fragging breed of rat - her brother will be found dead tomorrow morning in his room - spice overdose, everyone will blame it on the racy lives the holofilm, holodrama circles live - her mother will die a week later from an upset stomach -  they’ll blame it on the fish course, of course, something from Naboo, I should say - no one will bother with them, _these kinds of tragedies always come in threes_ , they’ll say while they attend their funerals. I take control of Sienar-Jaemus - her will doesn’t provide for anyone else to helm the company if all her family’s gone, and it’s profitable for them to merge with us, be us, one head instead of two. The First Order thrives, Sienar-Jaemus thrives, I thrive and I rule and my wife is a dead body they’ll find hanging from the vents in her office at Sienar-Jaemus and they’ll say the stress, the guilt drove her mad, drove her to take her life and I, _I_ am a rich and powerful man.

The world disappears.

“That’s what you wanted to hear isn’t it?” the General says. “Isn’t it?”

 

The General was never married, had never been married, would never be married, could never be married.

 

 

He’s on Hosnian Prime, in a long and empty corridor - odd, because there are no empty corridors on Hosnian Prime - and he can hear his mother’s voice, as though she’s just around the corner from him, telling him: _Ben what are you watching, Ben you know better than to fill your mind with this junk_ and he is fifteen again. There is an indistinct murmur in the background, a man’s voice - too businesslike and hysterical even for a Senator and filtered through a Holovision, two-dimensional and flat: the news - saying something about murder. He can’t hear much besides the word murder repeated every now and then, but he can picture it. Flashing red banners and constantly moving text slapped over the screen in unreadable combinations to impress the urgency of the situation on everyone. A murder has been committed, someone has done the unthinkable and has had the effrontery to have been _murdered_ on Hosnian Prime. He keeps moving down the corridor, away from the tinny man inside the Holovision and even though his mom keeps calling for him - _Ben? Ben?_ _Ben where are you? Ben, this isn’t funny - you’re too old for this now, Ben_ \- until he reaches a closed door. Closed doors aren’t for opening, he thinks. He should turn around and go back to find his mom. She’s saying - _Ben, darling, I don’t have the time to come hunting for you_ \- as though he doesn’t know that already, but when he turns around, the corridor is gone and all that’s left is a blank wall and Mom is on the other side of that wall, calling for him - _Ben_ \- and all he can do is go forward, into the room and discover whatever’s waiting for him there.

The tinny man’s Holovision voice cuts out the moment he steps into the room - sleek, modern, the way all rooms on Hosnian Prime are sleek and modern - and is replaced by the sound of music - a woman’s voice warbling in time to a waltz, _one-two-three-one-two-three_ \- sharp and distinct, the strings shrieking in time to the beat, like the sharp slick sound of blaster-shots going home to rest. The words are indistinct but the tune - he knows the tune, an old ballad from his childhood - no - but the memory floods back anyway: Han - Dad -  humming it as he wandered around the Falcon, tinkering with the wiring, sometimes launching into the chorus at full lung power until Mom would say ‘ _that’s a bit morbid for a love song, don’t you think_ ?’ and Han - Dad - would grin at Mom like it was the biggest joke he’d ever heard. In the present, the woman warbles, _Stars above, I’ve killed the only man I’ve loved_ and he steps cautiously into the room, pushing the door shut behind him. Han - Dad -  had always argued that the tragedy was the point: she murders her beloved and her beloved bleeds out into the crystal clear waters of Lake Sah’ot as the holidayers lounge above in their dachas along the Lake’s shorelines. Han - Dad - used to say it was a metaphor and Mom would always scowl when he used to say it - with a smirk, always with a smirk, like he’d discovered something smart to say that could get under Mom’s skin and was so true, Mom couldn’t stop him and Mom had to admire him. He used to think then it was because this was about Mon Mothma, and it used to scare him, thinking about Mon Mothma driving an antiquated knife (only gangsters and bounty hunters used knives) through her lover’s ribs, or even shooting a lover in cold-blood with a blaster, like the Senator they all knew was living a two-faced lie, but now he thinks, this was about both of them - Mon Mothma, Mom: the galaxy dying and her and her friends, totally divorced from it in their precious little world on Chandrila, now on Hosnian Prime and the New Republic was the knife, the blaster-shot they'd lodged beneath its ribs.

He imagines the blaster shot underneath his ribs and the blood spilling everywhere, the gentle waves of the lake slowly drawing him in and under and wonders if the General would leave him there - or if he would leave the General there, bleeding, drowning, dying, if Snoke asked him to. The General would follow his orders and he knows, so would he - _so would he_ . That makes them the most terrifying kind of men, because the most terrifying kind of men follow their orders and never ask _why_ because _why_ means, maybe, sitting by the banks of the lake and holding their lover’s head and stroking his hair as he bleeds out from where they’ve shot him and turning to the sky, palms open and asking _oh mother, what have I done?_ Only then, he thinks, he might understand why the woman warbles _Stars above, I’ve killed the only man I’ve loved_ with feeling, why his whole life reeks of death and dying - why this _place_ stinks of death -

In the bedroom, there is a man lying face down on the bed, naked, hand dangling limply over the side of the bed. His skin is an ugly, bloodless shade of grey-white, like his hair - also an immemorable shade of grey-white, where the man isn’t balding. The sheets are rumpled in a way that’s suggestive - too crumpled to be put down to just dying, not crumpled enough for a struggle to have taken place and that makes it suggestive because there are no marks around his neck, none that he can see. He reaches out and moves the man’s head and even though the skin is already turning waxy, it is still warm and his face is ordinary and human, not the purple-mottled death mask - eyes and tongue protruding - the strangled wear on their deathbeds, human and normal, totally normal, he could imagine the man dying in his sleep if he tried - except for the look of shock on his face, the trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth, the deep red stain on the sheets underneath him and the thin maroon line across his throat where his killer has slit it open: a classic and intimate murder in these days of professional assassins and their untraceable poisons, bombs and long range blaster-rifles.

And now that he’s close enough that he can touch the dead man’s body he can see the ways the scene falls apart and the merely suggestive is gruesome, lewd: the shallow thin trails of blood on his back, too uneven to be fingernails, too even to be incidental, unintentional, accidental, scars acquired someplace else, somewhere that isn’t here - the blood is too fresh, the scars are too raw, the scars are too shallow to be torture, too far away and too deep to be fingernails - and if a scar isn’t torture, the man is naked, what else can it be but pleasurable? And if a pleasurable scar hasn’t been made by fingernails, what else can it be but perverted? In the memory, the man is face up - still naked, but face up - his hips are pixelated, a blurry indistinct mass - but the holoimage is everywhere - everywhere he turns - the naked man pixelated waist downwards - Senator Radil from some Centrist planet or the other - he likes war and he’s been holding the Centrists in thrall over their proposal for the further demilitarization of the New Republic because of it - Senator Radil, naked and pixelated and slapped over every single Holovision in the galaxy and he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t understand. It’s on the holorag he likes to watch because its news is wild, sensationalized and scandalous and he likes the idea, that people are all as ugly inside as he is and that there are people dedicated to revealing it to the galaxy at large - all that fleshy underbelly exposed and sliced open and guts spilled out for everyone to see - but he can’t see why this - why a Senator, naked in his own bed, force’ sake, not even someone else’s, is scandalous - why the idea that a Senator could die while having sex is scandalous or titillating - why, why, why - Mom muttering _stars, they’ve really done it this time_ before she turns the Holovision off and confiscates the remote - and he didn’t understand at sixteen - but here, standing over the dead man, fingers still trailing through the dead man’s hair, he gets it - the why - because its not just the nudity, or the horrifying idea that Senators have private lives, sexualities, all the icky parts of life and living people don’t want to think about, but the nudity and the scars - the nudity and the pixelated bits and the thin shallow scars together - evidence of pleasure - _Centrist Senator Found Murdered -  Secret Vice Revealed!_ \- _Perverted Middle-Aged Man’s Shame_ -

He nearly misses the hissing sound of someone running the water in the ‘fresher in the short pause between this song and the next, another song about murder, a whole string of songs about murder, except this one’s about the murderer, The Corellian and his sea-killer smile - _but you’ll never see his knife, dear_ . _You’ll never see the blood stain, dear_. It’s almost sick: either coincidence or a killer with a morbid sense of humour - but then a man who could listen to a holorecording of classic galactic murder ballads while a stranger slices his back open for fun and not think this was an ominous sign might deserve this even. Deserved to be made a fool, a hilarious case study in cosmic irony, in the Force’s perverse sense of humour. It’s too good to be true in any other way: the dead man and his absurd collection of classic songs about murdered lovers and murdering monsters, the murderer in the refresher washing the blood stains away while a female warbles about The Corellian’s gloves, covering the bloodstains on his hands. Or he assumes, the murderer - someone arrogant, someone who had the nerve to pull something like this. They’d never caught the murderer, so he didn’t know. For all he knew, it could’ve been the Senator’s wife in there, while the Senator romped away with a secret lover and ended up murdered for his infidelities. He’d heard the holorags say as much. The murderer had disappeared entirely by the time they’d got around to wondering who’d really done it. They’d spent so much time plastering Senator Radil’s ridiculous figure everywhere, they’d forgotten all about the murderer until the Senate was forced to announce there was no murderer to be found. Just the sensual, enigmatic figure the holorags had conjured to titillate the galaxy.

The door to the refresher slides open. He only hesitates for a moment before he steps in. The mirror on the wall is misted over. All he can see of himself is a vague silhouette - his strange face, distorted by the condensation, and his dark hair. A blurry outline. _A self portrait_ , he thinks. The walls are made of marble - fancy - and they’re slick and slippery with condensation - so is the floor - slippery and slick underneath his boots. There are clothes on the floor. Boots, carelessly discarded - and they look so familiar, so familiar, the present and the past intersecting violently - he should know those boots, he’s seen those boots somewhere before, somewhere after - after the rupture and after he’d burnt Ben Solo, standing there in his room. His silhouette had looked so different: a strange and unformed indistinct, hairless blob staring at him from the misty condensation. He’s framed here, by his dark hair. Awkward angles all hidden by his hair.

There are gloves too, tossed casually into the sink. A red stain is forming where they’ve been tossed, bright against the white marble and invisible against the gloves - the irony, _the irony_ \- and the bloodied gloves are familiar too - he should know the name - it’s there at the edge of his memory, tantalizingly dancing just out of reach. The murderer is here. He should know his name, he can’t shake the feeling that he knows his name. He turns away - from the gloves, the clothes, the boots, the mirror - his face, smudged and indistinct in the mirror, a half-remembered, half-created thing - towards where the evidence is being washed away - and in the fresher - and in the fresher -

He watches rooted where he is, like a ryukyan hare caught in the blinding light of a hunter’s glowrod, through the misted transparisteel, as the General lets the water run through his red hair, water running down his neck, between his shoulders, down his back, through his hair, until it drips off the end of the General’s nose - the General’s face all hidden in shadow, hidden by the arm pressed against the wall of the fresher, hidden - part shadow, part flesh, part something else entirely: caught between dark lines and sharp angles and softer, human shapes - human and naked and blithely unaware. The water pours over him. The General moves, rubs his face, holds his neck. His eyelashes are long and delicate and clumped together by the water. Something about it makes the General look delicate and careworn even though the General is twenty and looks it - too thin and too vital and too transparent to be thirty four. Too young to be careworn - and water - and water - down the General’s back - his hips - thighs - and blood - blood and water slowly draining away -

Here is his proof: a dead body, bloodstained gloves in the General’s size, the General showering on the scene of the crime and blood, blood draining away, away.

“Hux,” he says. It comes out all wrong in a sob, caught between fear and desire with the realization that he’s intruded on a murder dawning on him, along with the realization that a man who could murder once and in cold blood, could easily murder again, _would murder again_ \- and he kicks himself for being stupid enough to open his mouth and let the noise out and -

The General doesn’t even open his eyes, but the hard twist to his mouth disappears in a smile and for a moment the sound filters into the fresher, over the sound of the water - _but The Corellian’s smile is bloodless, when his victim’s blood is shed_ \- _and you’ll never see the blood, dear_ , _you’ll never see the blood dear_ _you’ll never see the blood dear_ -

“A credit for your thoughts,” the General says. “You’ve clearly got something you want to tell me. Something you want to _know_ . Something you _want_.”

The General shouldn’t know how those words fit together. He created them. He put them in the General’s mouth. And now the General has a life of his own, a monster inside him - the Force gone wrong. It has a perverse sense of humour, the Force. It gives you the things you want and they aren’t real. It gives you the things you want and then they turn on you and attack you. It gives you things and they’re all fake, and they’re all fake until they _aren’t_. Kylo Ren used to be a lie until he wasn’t, until Ben Solo was the lie, until the Force swallowed him whole because the thing about the Force is: you can take and take and while you’re taking, it’s eating and the Force is _hungry_ . It eats and eats and eats and is never satisfied and he’s overstayed his welcome here. He tries to run, but the General’s hand - warm and wet - _blood-slick_ , he thinks dizzily, even though it’s just water - shoots out and grips his wrist hard.

“Don’t go,” the General says pleasantly. Too pleasantly. “I want to hear your answers.”

“No you don’t,” he says, trying to prise the General’s fingers loose. When had the General opened the door? He thinks - _should have paid attention_ \- and by the time he has that thought, the General has his other wrist in his hand and has forcibly turned him to face the shower’s opening.

“You don’t want to know,” he says feebly, turning his head away - a childlike action, a tantrum. But then he’s all child. The General says so. He heard him tell a Colonel, the loyalty officer, a _friend_ , once - _I wouldn’t care if he wasn’t such a child about simple fragging protocol_. _Stars he makes running this ship an uphill endeavour_. That’s what he is. A child and an uphill endeavour. The General doesn’t want him. The General doesn’t want anything to do with him - _do you understand?_ he hisses at the little glowing hollow inside him where he imagines the Force resides _he doesn’t want anything from me_.

It doesn’t end.

“But I do,” says the General, pulling him towards the shower. “You know so much about me - and I don’t know anything about you at all -”

The door shuts behind him with an air of finality, as the spray spatters his clothes. He registers this vaguely - the dampening clothes, slowly sticking to him. The heat, plastering his hair against his forehead. That isn’t important. What’s important is how this is beyond his control, how even though a distant part of him is screaming at the dream-vision to fold, he can’t make it stop - he can’t move his limbs at all, he can’t wake up, he can’t wake up, can’t wake up - He swallows. He’s killed. He’s murdered too. None of this should bother him, not even the way the General’s fingers are gently pressed to his wrist as though taking his pulse. He even sleeps well at night, force-sake. He sleeps at night. He doesn’t hear them scream or see them scatter or feel the fear radiating off them - he can’t even remember their names now. He can’t remember any of their names. They’re all ashes. Dead things, dispersed in the wind - in the Force.

“That’s not fair now is it?” the General tells him, finally releasing him in favour of the soap.

The General starts soaping himself and - he’s seen this before, he’s dreamt it - fantasized about it - the General’s elegant hands sliding over his body - touching himself - of course he’s fantasized about it, but the thing about fantasies is that they don’t grow lives of their own and the characters all follow the scripts, instead of turning on him without warning - and he can’t look away and he can’t move away and the door is shut and there is a dead body outside, slowly cooling, dead and his mom telling him to turn the Holovision off, then coming in and turning it off anyway before telling him he should listen to all this nonsense but he can’t look away, he can’t stop thinking about the body, squalidly naked and ugly and pixelated and the General with a knife, the General naked and with a knife and he can’t - and he can’t - he can’t look away -

“Life isn’t fair,” he says, slouching against the wall. It comes out sullen and boyish. _Child child child_.

The General smiles again. “You want to know the story.”

“No,” he squeezes his eyes shut. “Yes. Stop.”

“You can stop this any time you want,” says the General. Another one of those truths that are true but aren’t _true_. He can’t stop this. He’s going off the rails and he can’t stop it.

“Why’d you kill him?” he says. It means “why did you have to kill him like that”, “did you know this death haunted my teenage years”, “did you know the Senate would fight for months over the coverage” “did you know they said Mom was responsible for this and was that what you wanted” _was that what you wanted was that what you wanted was that what you wanted_ -

“Why do we do what we do?” the General muses philosophically, arms awkwardly angled as he soaps his back. “That’s not the question you want to ask.”

“You don’t - know -”

“You know the answer already,” the General says. He tries not to track the movement of the General’s hands - lower - tries to ignore the way the heat spikes through his body - the General’s hand idly - meditatively - raking through the hair on his belly - the steam is uncomfortable, a single drop of sweat trickles down the back of his neck and he’s uncomfortably aware of himself - his hair plastered to his forehead and his clothes, all wrong and all soaked now, and the warm droplets trickling down his face - and the steam - the heat - the General fondling his cock - toying almost absentmindedly - would even be believable if not for the knowing gleam in the General’s eye when he looks up at him -

“What concerns you is the mechanics. _Why is he naked_?” the General continues. “Why are there _cuts_ across his back? Why am _I_ naked? Why am _I_ in the man’s refresher, having a shower? Did I want to wash the last traces, not of blood, but of his hands off of me? What kind of idiot takes a man with a knife to bed with him? Did I hate his guts? Did I feel sorry for him? _Did I enjoy it_ -”

“No,” he says sharply. Too sharply, too quickly. The General’s face lights up in delight.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he says, words all sharp-edged and childlike and hasty. “I’m not - interested -”

It’s the wrong word.

The General’s smile grows sharper, more defined.

“No,” the General says. “But you _must_ hear the story - no, look at me - don’t think about escaping, you’ll only hurt yourself: can you imagine them looking at you - wondering if you were trying to wash the last lingering traces of his hands off you? If you _liked_ being pawed by him - what kind of devious things go on in that little brain of yours? If you _like_ using knives on men, if you’re _sick_. Oh you look horrified _now_. Not a nice feeling is it? I’ll tell you what’s a nice feeling though, and you’ll listen - you might even learn something -”

The General closes his eyes and runs his hands through his hair before talking.

“You’d be surprised at the number of Senators who are fond of young boys,” the General says. “Something about youth and beauty and sentimental backwards-looking - recapturing the thrilling flush of youth - that inspires them to want to stick their cocks in barely legal young men. I suppose it makes them feel dashing and handsome, to imagine they’re attractive enough to the young in all their virile vitality and youthful arrogance. Sad, but perfect really - what else do you do if you’re in intel and you need to keep the Senate twined round your little finger? You can bribe half of them. The other half’s too rich and powerful to be successfully bribed - oh there’s always weaknesses of one sort or the other, but sometimes you need a quick and easy route - and when a Senator’s hands wander, just the slightest bit, a hand lingers a second too long on your lower back, someone looks at you for a tenth of a millisecond too long, a single word, misspoken - well, you learn to read the signs and you realize it’s faster to use the surest and crudest route to get the job done because what matters, in the end, _is_ the end, not the means you used to get there. Besides, it keeps their mouths shut. No one wants to own up to their peculiar vices. Everyone accepts bribes, but not everyone wants to make love to someone young enough to be their child. So, no one talks and we remain a mystery.

“Did I enjoy it?” the General pauses pensively, then shrugs. “Bodies are funny. Treacherous. I suppose I must have liked it. It was definitely very, uh, educative. Radil had plenty of peculiar vices - you know there are some Senators who have funny ideas about _corrupting_ youths, they like the beauty but they don’t want to sully it even though they’ve got these filthy, ugly thoughts inside their heads - I never understood it. Well, Radil wasn’t like that. He wasn’t very creative, but he had thoughts and I learned fast and together we made a match of it - it’s terribly convenient that he wanted to be, um, passive. I’m not sure I could have enjoyed being pawed at _and_ tied down. He had very clammy hands, you know - cold and lizard-like. It could make things uncomfortable during sex - can you imagine it? One moment I can barely breathe because his mouth’s doing marvellous things with my nipple, the next moment a cold clammy hand’s grabbing my cock - it’s incredibly off-putting - and he could never make them warm, which made it worse because he insisted on putting them everywhere. Touching me everywhere. You don’t learn how much to appreciate warm hands until you’ve had someone put their cold, clammy hands on your cock and all you can think of is fragging fish. But I enjoyed everything else - don’t look so horrified. We didn’t have all the choices and the luxuries you did when starting out. After a while we took what we got. Radil liked being told what to do and he was surprisingly flexible - even a good pfask, when I could keep his hands pinned down -“

He tries to picture it: Senator Radil, alive and naked, making love to the General. All he can see is the corpse with its ugly cut throat and its bulging surprised eyes - cold clammy hands, after all. Cold clammy dead hands against the General’s warm and vital form. That squalid bulky dead form, on top of the General’s much slimmer form - writhing - wriggling - like - _graveworms_. The thought makes his skin prickle hot and cold by turns and his stomach churns - nausea - the strange empty and jittery feeling of too much adrenaline shooting through his spine that sets his teeth on edge and makes him want to puke.

“Look at me,” the General says, gently turning his face towards him. His fingers are wet and warm on his chin. “Look at me and listen carefully. Senator Radil served a purpose. I tried to talk him into withdrawing his support for the continued militarization of the New Republic, but he wouldn’t listen. He called me a _darling pet_ and said I was too young to understand the ramifications this would have for galactic security. He didn’t know, of course, who I was - I was just a violinist with a sharp wit and a wealth of Empire-related memorabilia to him. His mistake. I tried my best. I even let him paw me over dinner. Interesting experience - being groped between the soup and the fish, but at least he didn’t try footsie. I don’t think he had the audacity to carry it off. Anyway, I’d already had my instructions and the Senator wasn’t doing much to sell his case to me - it was inevitable it’d happen, I don’t know why you’re so surprised about it.”

He wants to say: _I’m not surprised_. The words won’t come. His tongue is heavy, strange inside his mouth, feels like his insides are being sucked out of him while someone's pumping adrenaline through him a mile a minute and it hurts and it shakes, shakes, shakes.

“We’re having desert when he puts his hand - still fragging cold and clammy - over mine,” the General’s saying. “And he says ‘you know you’re bright, but you understand, this isn’t like music - it’s not all passion, heart and fire - we have to be cold and pragmatic, think about what happens five years? Ten years? A full century from now? - but _stars_ , we’d do better if the Senate had more idealists like you’. It’s a compliment, I suppose - a pathetic one, but what can you do? So you know, I do the old trick - the one you’re so good at yourself. I suck his fingers, make sure he’s watching me and I say, ‘not _so_ idealistic’ and he laughs, breathy, and says ‘you aren’t as much of a man of the world as you think you are’. Well, a boy can’t ask for a better cue than that. I told him I could be - ‘not so much the ingenue’ I say. ‘You’ve never asked me what I want - if I want’ and he looks - blindsided -”

The General closes his eyes, letting the water run down his face. _Run_ , screams every single part of him. He edges closer to the door and reaches for it - run before the General remembers that he’s a witness and witnesses make murders messy affairs - before the General takes his knife - a meat knife, of all the absurd things - and uses it on him and leaves him here to die quietly. Half-drowning, half-bleeding. Like the song.

“I wouldn’t” says the General, cold and menacing - grabs him by the wrists and holds him in place. “We’ve only just reached the best part - I begin to spring the trap - I go over to Radil’s collection of Holorecords - his vanity - and I select a compilation of classic tragic love songs and pour us drinks. He thinks it’s all a laugh, even when I whisper in his ear - ‘you don’t know what I’m capable of’. All he says is ‘show me’. So I take one of the knives - for the steak, made of silver, stars sake - and tell him. ‘I’d like to have you on your knees and hear you whimper as I slice your back open - you ever tried it?’. ‘You’d like to hear me beg wouldn’t you?’ he says. Well I would. Who wouldn’t? I tell him as much. ‘I won’t stop until you beg, until you’re screaming my name’ I say.  ‘Naughty boy’ he says and takes my glass away from me - puts it on the table - and stars - puts one of his cold, clammy hands on my face and kisses me.

“He wasn’t a bad kisser, Radil. I suppose that comes with age - along with attention to oral hygiene. He’s got his hand on the small of my back and his other one palming at my crotch and his tongue in my mouth - and I think, it could be ridiculously easy to finish him off right there - stick the knife into his neck and let the blood pulse over my fingers until he’s bled dry - but you know, I put my arms around his neck instead and I let him put his cold, clammy hands all over me until I had to get his clothes off - ridiculous cape, shirt, trousers - he’s fit for a politician, especially someone his age - more vanity - and I make him get on the bed, kneel over his back and that’s when the fun starts.”

There are strange shadows dancing across the General’s face, a wild gleam in his eyes as he leans forward. It makes his stomach flip - fear or desire, _fear_ or  _desire fear or desire_? The thought makes his hands tremble, even though the General has them held firmly in front of him where the General - where they can both see - the way he falters - fails -fears - wants - doesn’t want -

“Please stop,” he whispers. The hiss of the water is very loud, fills his head - a static white noise that narrows the world down to just the General and himself and the tiny confines of this cubicle - that makes breathing against the noise, the steam, the water, a struggle.

“Have you ever been on top of someone like that?” the General continues, between a purr and a whisper. “Knowing they’re entirely at your mercy? The man trusts me - before I kneel over him, he smirks at me and gives me a smoldering look, a come hither - doesn’t even flinch when I study myself in the knife’s blade - he puts his head down and closes his eyes when I straddle him. Not even the slightest tremor in his thighs, no tension, not even when I run the flat of the knife along the inside of his thigh to see - he’s warm - so warm - not even the slightest shiver when I lean forward and kiss his neck and count - one two three four -”

He counts - he can’t count - his own heart is hammering against the back of his teeth, wild and uneven - and the General knows, he knows, from where his fingers are pressed against the inside of his wrist - he wonders how many times the General has done this before, whether he does it every time he makes a kill, if this is some kind of sick ritual - whether Radil understood just what the General was doing when he kissed him, but if he had, he would have been alive so he hadn’t - where it leaves him: the boy, caught in the remains of a trap set for someone else. He tries - breathes - tries to calculate the distance between the General and the knife - a second to reach it, another to pick it up - enough to use the Force - _if_ he has the Force and _if_ he can move - but, but - and the General continues talking, continues on and the words wash over him -

“- first slice goes across the fleshy bit under his right shoulder - his muscles tense for a moment, fingers squeeze the sheet - I dig my fingers into it hard and he screams - shoots straight to my cock - imagine, a grown man screaming in pain because the salt in your fingers stings his skin - I can’t help stop and run my tongue along the thin track of blood and he swears and bucks underneath me and frag he’s so good, so soft and so warm and there, I have to press into his thigh and the friction - I have to rub against him and he hisses ‘yes you _dirty dirty boy_ ’ -”

He thinks - the General’s hand on his neck and all of a sudden, the air supply to his lungs cut off - the pain in his throat from where the General had pressed too hard and the purple ring of bruises - the pain - the General’s long fingers in his hair -

“- every time I dig my fingers into the scars  he cries and squirms and then writhes when I lick and lick - you didn’t see did you? - I lean down and ask him if he’s hard and he takes my hand somehow - he’s half on his knees and puts my hand between his legs - his cock is wet, leaking - obscene - I push him back down and somehow, don’t know how - we’re awkwardly half on our sides, somehow propped up by elbows and knees and stars knows how - but I keep stroking him with one hand - while I slice with the other and this time when I lean forward and kiss his neck his pulse beats a wild and erratic tattoo - onetwoonetwo onetwoonetwo -”

\-- the General’s hands and water, water everywhere - _please_ , he whispers, _please don’t_ and the General forces his head underwater - _so silent_ \- his own heart, hammering against the back of his teeth - onetwoonetwoonetwoonetwo - too fast to count - and everywhere the blackness - the water, water on his face, on his clothes and steam - no, water - water in his lungs -

“- tug his head back by the hair and kiss him - let him slide his tongue into my mouth and when he’s moaning - bucking, twisting under me, stars but it’s like he can’t get enough of this shit - and right before I explode - I take the knife and slice it right across - the aortid, the jugular, the windpipe - all of it -  everything explodes -”

\-- warm water on his face - warm water - warm - warm - not hot - warm - warm is a human temperature - thirty seven degrees of human warmth - warm - warm - blood, blood on his face and his clothes and screams - and mud - and rain on his face - raindrops - raindrops like shower-drops of water - and screams - and blood splattering across his face, up his nose, in his lungs - _bodies_ -

“- blood absolutely fragging everywhere - I can’t keep my eyes open, just pull the hair between my fists and wait till I finish coming in my kriffing pants - there’s blood everywhere and his body jerks wildly, uncontrollable and it’s all warm and wet - inside my pants, on his neck, throat, everywhere - between his legs - all of it warm and wet - and he’s dead, he’s stone cold dead and a disgusting, perverted middle aged man -”

_Bodies -_ body - hands - blood, blood everywhere -

“ _Please stop_ ,” he whispers. “ _Please_ \- _I’ll_ \- I won’t tell - I’ll do anything - anything -”

Blood, drying in his hair - hair plastered to his forehead - he says, _sweat_ \- later when he washes it all out there’s red everywhere, red, red, red -

“It’s not so funny now is it?” the General asks. “Go on, picture it. Imagine their eyes fixed on you, gaze crawling over you - you’re not a person, you are a body, just your body - a murderer, an erotic murderer - as they piece together the murder and wonder if you _enjoyed_ it. It isn’t funny, isn’t _sexy_ anymore, is it? Imagining whether I enjoyed it, whether he enjoyed it, whether I _liked_ having his hands all over me - you, picturing him pawing at me like a thing - it’s not so funny when the _thing_ begins to talk, when it gains a life of its own, when it stops being _sexy_ and starts being _disgusting_ -”

He pictures: the corpse’s hands, the dark red line across the corpse’s throat, the General’s hands around the man’s throat, the General’s hands around his throat - the General pulling the knife across his throat and instead of the frantic pulse in his neck now, blood - or the General holding his head - drowning him in the shower - can a person be drowned in a shower? he thinks, _no_ , but the General makes a point of breaking the law of physics and if the General holds him under the showerhead for long enough then maybe, maybe - he cannot breathe, he cannot breathe - he tries to breathe but it’s all water - spray - and blood -

“- _but that’s what you wanted_ -” the General is - not yelling, but too loud and the shower is too small, much too small - and he dimly registers his body, shaking, being shaken, his wrists hurting from where the General is holding him. “ _It’s what you wanted, so look at me and tell me, tell me this wasn’t what you were thinking, that you weren’t picturing me coming as I fragging murdered the Senator in his fragging bed_.”

Breathe - in - out - in - and the dead man’s cold clammy hands, on his face - and the knife in his throat, the knife, in his throat -

“ _Let me go_ ,” he says. Sobs. His face - his cheeks are wet - his eyelashes - it isn’t the shower. “ _Please._ ”

The General lets go of his wrists and then one beat, two beats, three beats - the hiss of water - and then he starts to laugh and laugh and laugh and then says, in a voice dripping with scorn:

“ _Stars_ , you didn’t really believe that did you, you _disgusting_ creature?”

 

**ACCESS DENIED.**

**ACCESS DENIED.**

**ACCESS DENIED.**

 

 

 

 

He is on Chandrila and Mom is holding his hand as they walk through the marketplace and the world is much larger, much taller and wider than it should be. The sky is further away, dwarfed by the buildings on either side, the way he remembers it from the last time he visited it with Mom and _surely_ the view must look different now but if it does, he can’t reconstruct it and supplant the childhood memory with a precise and accurate image derived from the last time he visited the planet - in disguise, in a mask, in his black robes, to wreak terror - as an adult. This is the point, this is the crux of the memory: everything too large and distorted and him, a child in an adult’s body, forced to follow his mom through the winding streets as the back of his neck prickles with the sensation of someone watching them - eyes trained on them - an invisible pair of eyes that could be hidden away anywhere - there are enough people walking around for a pair of watchful eyes to hide - but which he knows for certain are _up_ and to the right and back of them. Mom is saying something to Mon Mothma and Dad is lost somewhere in the crowd along with Chewie and maybe even Uncle Lando, he isn’t sure, and ahead, ahead, that’s the crux - not a Moff or an Admiral or anything as grand, but a simple humble member of the Imperial Engineering corps being escorted by a couple of New Republic soldiers. A Colonel from the Imperial Engineering corps, the only person in this marketplace brimming with life, who _feels_ it, who _must_ feel it, because he keeps glancing around nervously and is sweating far too much to just be the simmering heat and because it can’t be the soldier with his hand tucked firmly under the guy’s elbow, keeping them moving, as unsuspicious as possible: a simple unimportant man being moved from place A to place B, no one significant, nothing worth looking at - move along now, keep going - and they keep going, glancing only at Mom and Mon Mothma and the soldiers moving along - and at the center of this, this one man - one of the architects of the Death Star and the key to cracking the secrets of the Empire’s research facilities, scattered across the galaxy which is the problem because there are invisible eyes, one pair of eyes too many and too keen tracking them as they move slowly across the plaza, who would like to stop them, who would like the Imperial secrets to stay secret.

This is all the adult is allowed to fill in, to paint the man’s form in gross detail (straightbacked and proud, at odds with the way he keeps craning his head to look around him and the sweat trickling on to his collar) and colour his history and the importance of this particular moment, while its particulars remain the memories of a spoilt ten year old child who shattered a viewport in a tantrum at being left behind. No one sees the invisible eyes: Mom, with the blaster tucked away in the long folds of her sleeves (her hands are too clammy and too cold and he feels the slightest tremble in them as they stoll amiably through the marketplace) and Mon Mothma, in the rearguard, a distraction to anyone who looks in the man’s direction - why look at him when they can stare at the heroes of the Rebellion, of the New Republic? - Dad and Chewie and Admiral Antilles and the place crawling with New Republic soldiers in plain clothes, mingling with the crowd and pretending to bargain badly over fabrics and starship parts and what have you - none of them see it or feel it. He wants to scream: _look up, look, they’re watching us_ but he is ten, eleven, too young and Mom is too tense, they’re all too tense to listen and no one looks, no one can feel the way the air goes wrong and the sun is too bright, just behind them because a good pair of eyes knows how to hide in the sunlight - like a pilot diving out of the sun: killer instinct -

Two gunshots. Crack crack.

The man’s knees buckle and he falls: a single red hole in his skull - screams and soldiers hastily pulling blasters out of holsters - someone hoists a blaster-rifle off their back and points at the sky - Dad, running towards them with his blaster drawn shouting: _down, get down_ \- sellers and shoppers scattering - a tinny voice shouting over a loudhailer: _nobody panic, nobody move_ \- soldiers in plain clothes running towards the buildings along the side but five seconds is five seconds too long, the sniper will be gone by now, they’ll never catch the killer it’s too late too late there is blood pooling along the ground blood and brains where the man has fallen and Mom’s skirt is stained red a little and his hands are sticky and it’s too late too late Dad is catching him and shouting and screams that’s Mom screaming and Mon Mothma is white-faced horrified and his hands are sticky when he removes them and when had he been holding them to himself in the first place but he removes them and they are covered in blood and it’s too late the killer will be gone now Mom’s shouting for help for bacta hands pushing his shirt up and pressing a balled cloth to the wound there just below his ribs straight in the centre of him and there he is lying in a puddle of his own blood while Dad cradles him in his lap and says _it’s going to be okay kid you’re going to be fine just keep breathing just breathe_ and Mom has one of his hands in hers and she’s crying and saying his name over and over again _Ben Ben Ben_ and then _Luke do something_ and Uncle Luke’s bending over him still blond-haired and blue-eyed and young without all the colour siphoned out of him and Uncle Luke says _Ben can you hold it together for me just for a moment_ and he nods because what can you do what can you do it’s too late for him he says _Mama, mama don’t cry for me mama I’m sorry mama I’ll listen to you next time_ and it comes out half-eaten in a sob-gasp _mama don’t cry_ that makes her cry even more and Uncle Luke is pressing a cloth to his stomach and a warm and tingling feeling spreads through his stomach before it stings and then burns and Uncle Luke jerks back in horror at the blood wetting the cloth and he says _the bacta isn’t working_ Dad is still chanting overhead hands shaking as he strokes his hair _kid you’re going to be fine just keep breathing stay with us Ben_ and Mom shrieks raw and horrible _don’t you dare touch him_ but Snoke is already there with his ugly scarred face and his hands all old and wrinkled waving over the wound and it burns and it burns and for a moment he can feel the skin stretch and tear filling the place where it’ss been torn away by the blaster bolt and then it stops and Snoke is shouting _foolish foolish boy_ and _weak idiot boy_ and Uncle Luke wringing his hands in horror _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry_ and he reaches for Mom because Mom shouldn’t Mom mustn’t Mom has to understand that this was how it was always going to happen that it was always too late for him _mama mama I’m sorry I didn’t mean to let you down_ and then the General finally the General appears with the blaster-rifle strapped across his back and Snoke says _don’t you dare_ but the General already has the towel out and soaked and the General says _tell me what you want_ so he looks at the General and says _fix me please_ and the General grins horrid and sharp edged and says _you can’t be fixed_ so he says _fragging finish it you bastard_ and Snoke says _how dare you_ and the General says

\-- _your orders, Supreme Leader_ \--

and the General clamps the towel down over his nose and mouth wet and awful and it feels like drowning like breathing in water everything feels so wet and murky and indistinct and the General’s hand is warm over his mouth and nose and Mom shrieks in anger and lunges for the General but she can’t move she can’t move and Snoke howls _you’ll pay for this_ and Uncle Luke there’s a look on his face like he understands now and he understands what he’s seeing and Dad says _kid don’t you dare don’t you dare Ben don’t you kriffing dare_ and the General just laughs and laughs and laughs until everything starts swimming and the world starts to disappears in black spots until it’s just the General and him and the void and his hands and feet jerking of their own accord trying to keep him alive and the General clamps down harder and leans closer and closer until the General’s forehead is pressed against him and the General says _I knew you’d find the source_ and the water rises over his head and the General holds him down until the blackness swallows up the General’s face until his lungs are screaming and his body is fighting him muscles clenching in his throat and his lungs squeezing and squeezing forcing the last of the air out of him and lights sounds faces it all goes it all goes and the water finally finally fragging fills his lungs and drowns the air out of him and the last thing he hears is Chewie’s roar and the General whispering _goodnight and goodbye Ben Solo_ -

 

Ben Solo Ben Solo Ben Solo Ben Solo Ben Solo Ben Solo --

 

\--

 

**iv.**

Failure was not an option, had never been an option. He touched the spot underneath his ribs, still aching as though the blaster-shot had been real and not just a figment of his imagination, his - no - violently exhumed from wherever he’d buried it - but no, it wasn’t true at all. There was no blood, no ugly gaping hole and no blaster shot and it was all a dream, false and reconstructed from reports and articles pulled off the HoloNet News Network, an ugly patchwork of things that did not belong to him, had never belonged to him and would not belong to him, were not his, not his - no - there were no scars along his stomach, he’d know if there was anything to mark the proof that he’d ever been shot even as a child, so it was false. False, as in not true, as in never happened, as in: a dream. Just a dream. A figment of his unconscious. His subconscious attempting to stitch all the fragging truths and lies and half-truths together into something coherent and believable, something fantastical: a story that could be told, that could entertain, that could _frighten_. That was the point of his existence. A warning to all the bad kids and wild children in the galaxy. A story in why it was a bad idea to keep secrets from children. _Once upon a time there was a boy named Ben Solo_ , it went, _and everyone thought he’d fit their story best and it tore him up to shreds because he didn’t know which story he belonged to anymore_.

Well here he was, trying to write one, hoping that if he could reconstruct the General and call his storied version into existence, maybe he could peel away the mysteries surrounding Luke Skywalker and call him into existence too. Or maybe, if he could call the General into existence, he’d make the man in the mirror real by accident. And if he could finally _see_ , understand why - what he was - he could turn that mirror on the man Luke Skywalker used to be and find - maybe then he’d find a truth - _the truth_ , a hyperdrive-route from A to B, that charted the whys and wherefores of Luke Skywalker. A point in the Force he could hold onto and then unravel the enigma, like the child in the story following a piece of string home to parents that didn’t want it because -

No, there was no wanting. Luke Skywalker was smart enough to know there couldn’t be any going back. No returns, no credits back. Return would mean he _wanted_ the past and whatever he wanted, it wasn’t the past, or even the present but something. The future. Whatever it was, it kept changing, shifting, like hyperspace lines - but there was one constant, one thing: a fact. Well he had a legacy to live up to, didn’t he? He was going to live up to it. Down to it. Be _strong_ . Unbreakable. Unshatterable. Indestructible. Invulnerable. Well he wasn’t was he? His own subconscious was playing traitor, slowly ripping him apart at the seams - a hand-torch held to the glue and throwing up the dead bodies - dead - _NO_ \- failure simply wasn’t an option and the Force had turned into an ugly and unruly monster, as likely to pounce on him as it was to do his will which he thought, but didn’t know and didn’t think he wanted to know, was the fault of the mirror image - all cracked and awful - like saber, like Jedi.

No. Failure wasn’t an option.

And yet here he was, a mirror shattering in slow motion, his hands pressed to his solar plexus searching for the warm pulse of blood that would tell him whether the dream was _just_ a dream or the Force or something nightmarishly worse: opened floodgates, opened graves and - _NO_ \- no, if he said the word it would call it into existence - he’d already called too much into existence, wild and uncontrollable and rapidly disintegrating, bits and parts floating away to gain lives of their own. The fantasy spoke back, the fantasy grew frenzied and chaotic, the fantasy turned on him savagely and ripped him to shreds, not just the way dream creatures did, but from under his skin - places that should have been hidden away from the General. He’d tried and he was no closer to understanding (and what did Snoke mean by understanding, anyway? understand the General, understand order? understand how to re-order himself? Become - become what? become the name, the mask, the man, created? well that wasn’t about to happen any time soon, not when he couldn’t even hold the pieces of himself together correctly to make the correct _name_ .) any of the things Snoke had wanted him to understand, no closer to finding a miracle solution to the problem, no answers, just a name and not even the right one repeating itself like a charm inside his head while his teeth chattered against each other, against his will and his hands kept shaking as he searched for the wound - too much adrenaline, too much nervous energy, too many lies crackling through his spine, his body, everywhere - tingling - until he had to struggle out of bed and kneel before that empty mask - his grandfather, lost somewhere in the Force, silent and uncommunicative - some days he thought: _dead_ and on others, like today, he thought: _fragging talk to me you kriffing bastard, why have you fragging left me?_

Why had _they_ left him? Who was _they_? Everyone. The whole damn galaxy. The whole damn galaxy and not a single answer to a simple question.

And Snoke looked down at him when he told him his dream and said, “Every minute we lose, the danger multiplies - exponentially - and Skywalker grows stronger -”

The _Resistance_ \- _NO -_ grows stronger.

They couldn’t afford it. A cold, hard fact. He understood it. He did.

“I understand.”

And Snoke leaned forward and said “Do you?”

Did he? Theoretically. Practically. Maybe. It was a fact. Another one of those cold, hard things that _meant_ something. But what did it _mean_ ? What good was a fact if it meant he knelt in front of an empty mask and heard only silence? What did it _mean_? What did Snoke _mean_?

“I'll find him,” he said.

Snoke said: “Every minute we lose brings us one step closer to failure, Kylo Ren.”

That was the problem wasn't it? Snoke had the correct name but there was an empty graveyard in his head, a doorway straight to Chaos or hell or whatever the pfask everyone called it - dead bodies and no grandfather.  

“You are not with us,” said Snoke. “Your mind is wandering, distracted. The Dark Side eludes you.”

And Snoke said: “Have you forgotten what you have learnt, _Kylo Ren_?”

And Snoke said: “Do you understand what failure means, _Kylo Ren_?”

And Snoke said: “Do not _lie_ to me _Kylo Ren_.”

And Snoke _meant_ : “Are you sure you know who you are, what you are, where you are and who you will be, _Ben Solo_ _Kylo Ren_?”

 

\--

 

**intermission**

 

 

 

The problem looked like this:

Once upon a time, there was a boy called Ben Solo and he disappeared overnight. He’d thought they would mourn him, bury him and claim he’d murdered himself (a paradox, when a person murders themselves it ought to be called a suicide but when one man became two, it was best to call it a murder - the same way Anakin Skywalker had _died_ during the Clone Wars, an unfortunate casualty, and Darth Vader had risen out of settling battle-dust) but what he hadn’t counted on was that no one liked to broadcast their failures, not even his parents, not even his uncle who went around blue-eyed and innocent-looking and had everyone he knew personally eating out of the palm of his hand. But those were the people he knew. Most places, Luke Skywalker was only just a legend, so no one cared, no one bothered about all the murdered young Jedi because the young Jedi were a legend too and so, even though the name Jedi-Killer travelled the galaxy, carried along in whispers and the darkest corners of starships, the HoloNet News Network told everyone that Luke Skywalker was nothing more than a whispered euphemism. Had they seen Luke Skywalker? No. Had they seen what Luke Skywalker could do? No. Had anyone seen Luke Skywalker kill the Emperor, kill Darth Vader? No. Did they know that Leia Organa was the daughter of Darth Vader? _Yes yes yes_.

Therefore, if Luke Skywalker was a legend, an elusive and mysterious creature, then clearly Luke Skywalker was no more than an euphemism conjured up by the Rebel Alliance, Resistance, whatever to hide all kinds of ugly things no one wanted getting out. Secrets and skeletons in vibrobroom-closets. And if Ben Solo had disappeared, gone to stay with Luke Skywalker - and didn’t everyone remember what a bad-tempered young teenager Ben Solo had been? how he’d carried himself with grace right until the moment he’d snapped (he always snapped and he always snapped in public) and left behind a trail of shattered viewports, broken noses and so many assault claims and oh yes, the _awful_ arguments Leia Organa and he used to get into in public, on _missions_? how he’d always been a _problem child_? - then maybe Luke Skywalker was no more than a convenient excuse for the Senator and her pod-racing husband. An euphemism. Of _course_ the problem child was shipped off to stay with his uncle to be ‘trained’, conveniently away from his parents - conveniently away from the public eye. Did it matter where he’d really gone? The answer was clear: the problem child had gone off the rails and had to be sent away for his ‘health’. What did you expect. What did you expect of a child raised in a family like that. Children weren’t meant to be diplomats at such a young age - well overnight, the HoloNet went crazy. Everyone became experts on children - that was the funniest thing, because they’d never been interested in kids before and now that was all they could talk about. The Verdict On Ben Solo. What did you expect would happen to a child raised by such irresponsible parents. He was pushed into it by his ambitious mother. It was his absent father, the _pod-racer_ and _gambler_. They were too young to have had a child. They should have known better. They didn’t know anything. They were too close. They were too distant. They were too preoccupied with themselves. Look at the Senator, always on the move, what kind of support could a child expect from a mother like that. They were too distant. They were too doting. He was spoilt, they had spoilt him, they should have been kinder, they should have been stricter - and then the final wave, the last thing he heard before he’d disappeared entirely, just after he’d discovered just what kind of lies they’d told him to make their lives comfortable and cushy: well, bad blood always shows. What did you expect of the grandson of Darth Vader. What did you expect. What did you expect.

So when Ben Solo dropped completely off the map, the galaxy had already tried and sentenced him and concluded that Ben Solo was mad, totally mad and written him off completely: mad boys weren’t good fodder for holorags. It reeked too much of voyeurism, more than they were prepared to take flak for. Nipple slips: okay. A mad boy, locked away somewhere: too much, too damn much. Or no, not too much, but too boring. How many stories could you tell about a mad boy before you started to look like an obsessive freak? The answer was: a month’s worth and you didn’t even get any tits out of it, so, not even a speck of human interest. It took them only a month after they’d sent him away to totally forget about him. It made disappearing so easy. They didn’t mourn him, they only crowed about how they’d been right about his bad blood, bad DNA, bad bad bad - like mother like son, like father like daughter. This was the solution to Ben Solo. Mad, but what did you expect of a family like that, really?

So: Ben Solo was still alive. Just a mad boy at a sanatorium for his health. And what a kriffing sanatorium.

 

\--

**v.**

The problem was this: he’d heard the story so many times, he didn’t know what he believed anymore.

Sure, he had facts - but the thing about facts was, you needed to sit down and link them all together and come up with a story. Now he had a story, or he once used to have a story but he hadn’t told himself the story for a long long time. It was hard to hold on to that particular story when there were so many different stories about him floating around, when Snoke - who was cleverer and wiser and had decades of experience and a deep and thorough understanding of the Force that he didn’t - had told him his story, as an outsider. Outsiders were objective observers, right? So it stood to reason, Snoke must have been right when he said there was never any smoke without fire. He’d seen it for himself hadn’t he? He’d burnt his hair standing in the middle of his room and there’d been fire and there’d been smoke and the smoke had set of all the fire alarms aboard the _Finalizer_ and brought the General bearing down on him like an irate nanny droid. Smoke. Fire. Cause. Effect.

(That was another problem - the General, who only ever veered between two states: pure robotic efficiency and anger at having his efficient little routine subverted by him - inscrutable and unhelpful - what did the General believe? what did the General think? who was he in relation to the General? what story did the General believe about him? did the General know the truth? or was it just the story the General knew, the ones peddled around in the holorags? could the General discover the truth for him? _would_ the General discover the truth for him? was the General even interested in the epistemological problem of the truth? was the General interested in anything except pure efficiency? was the General human?)

And yet - and yet - if Snoke was right, because smoke never went without fire and even stopped chronos got the time correct twice a day and the holorags told the truth once or twice a year and statistically, if they’d been talking about him every other month since he turned seventeen and he’d been living with - Leia Organa - on Hosnian Prime, trying to be a diplomat, then they must have struck right once or twice - and here were some more facts: neither of them had known what to do with him and they’d been kriffing awful at ‘reaching out’ to him or whatever the pfask they’d been trying to do with taking him everywhere on their diplomatic missions - some kind of sorry attempt at dislodging the dark little voice in his head which he’d thought was just him, you know, some kind of dark splotch from the Force that had found a way to sneak itself in and sat there squat and ugly in his mind, whispering things to him, but it turned out the voice had a name and its name was Snoke which was a shame, a real shame, because he’d thought that ugly dark thing was his only to find out that the ugly dark bits - the dark splotch from the Force that was just his - were lodged somewhere underneath his breast bone which sounded like it was too specific to be real but he could feel it moving around in there - and another fact: Han had been a sad kriffing mess of a father, because what could you expect from a smuggler and gambler and pod-racer? You didn’t want a father who thought cheap thrills was all that was needed to solve everything - imagine the audacity, of Han telling him: _hey kid, you know if you ever want out of this Jedi business, I could do with an extra pair of hands handling this whole pod-racing thing_ as though he’d have ever wanted to be a shitty fragging pod-racer when he could shape the force-damn galaxy - as though Han knew what he was talking about when he said: _kid I don’t want to pry, but you don’t look too happy to me_. He’d been happy. Perfectly fragging happy, thanks. Another fact: try this on for size - Leia married Han for all the cheap thrills she could get and when they’d had a kid, they’d tried to inflict this on him like he was supposed to take it as a sign they thought they were family and he couldn’t understand why, just why - why they’d even bothered with the whole charade of caring parents when they’d wanted adventure and they’d wanted to pack him off to Uncle Luke who’d forgotten to laugh somewhere between Endor and the present - who wasn’t anything like the Holovids they had of the Rebel Alliance taken by some nameless sorry sack before he got blown up out of the sky - and they should have just sent him off to a sanatorium for his ‘health’. But that was the thing, that was the thing, they seemed to all believe they’d been helping him but how could they say that? How could they say that? How could they say that when even the HoloNet Entertainment Network ran one of their late night special features on the Rebel Alliance - _Where are they now? Tune in at 2200 CGT_ \- and they had a child expert come on and say that raising him at the heart of the kriffing New Republic had been the worst fragging decision a parent could have made? No smoke without fire, Snoke had to be right and yet and yet -

(An unfortunate occurrence, too frequent, too unfortunate: the General found the map first. Maximum efficiency, maximum results. While he’d thrown himself to the Force and allowed the Force to take him apart, allowed the Force to spill his guts out on the cold hard durasteel floor of his room, the General had merely opened up the Imperial archives and hunted through the remains of Project Harvester and found a map - three-fourths of a map - and while he had been slicing into the encrypted parts of the First Order’s HoloNet system, the General had sicced his spies on the Resistance’s trail - smart, neat, efficient, a path carved straight to the place the General wanted to go and all the while, the monstrosity of Starkiller, coming together - another path carved straight to the heart of where the General wanted to go - a blaster-shot aimed straight at the New Republic - a blaster-rifle shot aimed straight at the head of an engineer in the Imperial Engineering Corps - a blaster-rifle shot aimed straight at his stomach and Snoke leaning over him and asking him if he knew what _failure_ was and hands - hands closing in around his neck, over his mouth - hands that pushed him under and the sweet metallic taste of the General’s fury, the General’s jealousy, the General’s envy on his tongue -)

And yet, and yet he felt like a doll all broken up and then stuck back badly together - like a glue-stat, stuck back with glue-stats - and it all fit - but it all felt strange and unfamiliar - glue-stats, you know - like there were bits of skin stretched over other bits of skin and the new bits were shiny and wonderful but new skin, new skin looks fake until it settles on you and bad new skin - the kind that needs to be cut off because there’s something sick growing underneath - looks really shiny and transparent and problem was, problem was - which kind of new skin was this? And if Han and Leia had stuck him together with glue-stats, if Snoke had too - if every inch of him was just glue-statted together - what did that make him - what did that make him? Was he still - him - a man - himself - self, like the metaphysical parts of him belonged to the amino acids and atoms and all the physical solids that went into making his body a fleshy thing - or was he split six ways down the middle - he was, he was - all glue-statted together and when he did dangerous things like look too closely or poke too closely or ask too many questions, too many fragging questions, it all kind of started melting and it left all the parts of him looking shiny and strange - but was it shiny like the new shininess of new skin or shiny like there were dead things, sick things underneath? That was the problem - and the other problem was Organa, because Organa had been just like him and she was fine, just fine - which could only mean there was something fundamentally wrong with him, sick things and dying things creeping along underneath his skin where he’d put them rather than kill them, burn them, get rid of them, carry the dead along with him because the dead reminded him he was stronger, better, harder, dangerous and razor-edged like the General’s smile - worse than the General’s smile, because a smile was just a smile, the vague promise of a threat, and every step he took was a threat, every move was a threat and the General couldn’t do that, the General couldn’t do that because the General was just a man, the General was just a smile, a dangerous razor-edged smile - and a pair of hands holding him down under water while he screamed and screamed and water filled his lungs - and the General was a man just like Han Solo, who was a man, a thief a smuggler a rogue a layabout a flyboy and weak weak weak so why, why for frag’s sake was he afraid, why for frag’s sake wouldn’t his grandfather tell him, why for frag’s sake wouldn’t the darkness come, why why why, why - why when he drove the lightsaber straight through Han Solo’s heart, did the world remain quiet and light and why, why - why - why was all he felt the General’s hands holding him under and drowning him - and the General’s laughter - and the General’s laughter - and the General’s laughter -

 

\--

 

**vi.**

He crawled into the General’s bed again when Starkiller was no more than a smoldering mess in the sky. A new star for an old star. Well that was what you got for aiming your blasters too high. The Force aimed itself at you, like an ugly cosmic weapon, and knocked you down. The higher you rose, the further the fall. The General should have understood that. _He_ should have understood that, but here he was instead all fleshy shiny tissue the bacta had woven in between the cuts and the scars and the blaster-shot in his side - in his _side_ , in his _side_ , _in his side_ \- and he’d cried - tears of relief - because it was _in his side_ and it was _real_ \- a real hole in his side and real blood and not just an awful nightmare, not just the Force, not just the Force, not whatever he’d twisted the Force into - which meant he wasn’t totally mad yet, he wasn’t totally gone yet, he wasn’t imagining things yet. The General should have understood all of that, but here the General was, hunched over his desk planning yet another leap straight into the sun, something else to add and remove stars at his will, another fragging superweapon to destroy worlds, to mold the galaxy into its proper shape: neat, regimented lines, a perfectly oiled machine in which all the motivators and flux capacitors and power couplings functioned properly, in which a man could press a single button and have the machine set in motion, fluid motion that always produced a result; a single uniform and standardized result.

The General should have understood: there wasn’t any fighting the Force. The Force gave and the Force took away and the Force looked at men, plain ordinary men like the General and the Force sneered - or was it him who’d gone and twisted the Force and turned it into a nightmare that drilled straight into him and left behind ugly fissures and fractures, a disfigured rock face - his own disfigured face? But the Force had done that. That was the power of the Force. And now, the real wonder of modern technology: bacta could hide it, make it disappear entirely so what was what? Maybe the General would destroy not one or five or entire star systems but whole arms of the galaxy now. Maybe the General would destroy the Force, rend holes so large in it, the Force would turn upon itself and collapse, a black hole falling into itself. And he’d go with it. The General would make sure he went with it. The General would push him straight into it if it came to it and it would, it would.

Well here he was, kneeling at the General’s side again, the glue all coming apart and the General still a fragging inscrutable secret, despite all the emails and the archives and the files he’d sliced into and the files he couldn’t slice into but existed, implied in the blacked out mentions of reports, in the sometimes strange and cryptic half-finished sentences in the General’s emails, in his strange climb to power - FO-275, too isolated to be a posting with a promotion in it - all of them too isolated to be postings with promotions waiting in them - fragments of a secret life no one knew, fragments of  a man - and what he was, what he was, was a seamless series of events, while the General was discrete fragments floating around in space because there was no man in between, there was no man at all - _there was_ _no man at all._ But he had something better, something worse - a single blaster-shot, one single blaster-shot - the man lying dead on the ground in the middle of the marketplace on Chandrila - the blood pooling around his head, around that neat little hole and the assassin, already gone by the time they’d figured it all out and the guard had scattered - the same way whoever it had been on Hosnian Prime had disappeared - never a man, no one at all - and this was madness because the General couldn’t have been any of those killers - was not the General - even if the General was a psychopath - and it wasn’t even that, just a tendency, a probability, a could be which made it as good as a lie - a fact but not enough to be a truth, just enough facts for a fantasy, just enough facts to spin a story out of nothing, enough facts to turn the man who was nothing at all into the man who was everything: the man, the fantasy, the psytech, the killer, the lover, the man with a million faces and a million doubles and a million secrets - the man, the myth, the mystery, something real, something true, something worse than false.

“What are you?” he mouthed, against the General’s fingers - gloved and held against his mouth like the General was only tolerating this, like the General would’ve liked to know how to destroy the galaxy and not frag him into his mattress until he couldn’t remember his name.

He did it good, too - licked and sucked the General’s fingers - and all the while the General did one-handed calculations on his datapad, didn’t even bother looking down at him - didn’t even bother with a _hello_ or even a ‘get out Ren’, just - nothing. Pure robotic efficiency and not even a flinch when he ran his hand up the inside of the General’s calf, inside his thigh. Just, silent acceptance. His dues. Well they were, weren’t they? Payback - a crazy kid’s way of saying sorry - for the ugly fantasies and the way he’d woken; his heart racing and adrenaline coursing through him and that old jittery feeling like it was all too cold, or maybe he was too excited - and he’d though, each night, that was it and slipped his hand inside his pants and fragged his hand until he could pretend the stories went the way they did and the General remained a strange, bland enigma he could frag his fantasies on to, nothing as ugly as living or breathing - _no man at all_ \- _no man at all_ , he thought, as he begged silently with his eyes and sucked - not one, but three, _three_ \- and the General remained totally un-fragging-moved.

No, not entirely true. The General looked down at him when he asked the question and it was a start because the General’s eyes went wide - not a lot, but a start - looking at him, on his knees, broken and begging with his nerf-calf eyes.

“A human being,” the General answered dryly, corner of his mouth quirked upwards in half-a-grin. And then said, “what do you want Ren?”

The General said it all resigned, like he’d just finished destroying one of their comm units against and now the General had to go paying for the damage out of his pocket, or by pawning one of the old pieces of Imperial art he was so infatuated with. One humiliation heaped upon the other while the rest of high command laughed at him behind their hands. That was it, wasn’t it? The metallic taste of anger that lingered on his tongue: _he_ was the cause, the effect, the everything. And yet, not enough to actually command the General’s attention the way the General had had no eyes or ears or anything else for Starkiller once they’d given the order to fire - the way the General had burned red in the holovid they broadcast to the galaxy over the HoloNet: _and_ _all remaining systems will bow to the First Order and will remember this as the last day of the Republic!_ As though death and duty could ever substitute the touch of real flesh and blood, as though the General was a droid hardwired to look and feel like a human and love only the sight of destruction and himself, emperor of that fragging mess.

(“What are you?” he asked and the other General, the one he kept inside his brain and only ever pulled out when the itch got too strong to ignore, answered: _a fanatic_.

And the real General remained stubbornly, irritably inscrutable and impenetrable.)

“Have you ever killed someone?” he asked the General.

“Is that what’s been bothering you?” the General replied, somewhere between contemptuous and amused. “I don’t have any field experience, you know that.”

He mouthed at the palm of the General’s hand and begged - dared - the General to react.

“But have you killed someone?” he mumbled into the leather of the General’s glove.

The General seemed unbothered by this, merely looked slightly pensive at the question, as though his hand was disconnected from the rest of his body, as though _he_ wasn’t kneeling there and practically begging for it - _look at me, frag me_.

“Once,” the General said. “Several times. People don’t get to be the best shot at the Academy without someone wanting to put them to good use. I liked the feel of the blaster-rifle and no one ever bothered looking twice in the direction of a scrawny teenager - but stormtroopers - they always look so they always got the worst of the fire. It’s not a comfortable life. I don’t do very well without my comforts.”

The engineer, later, a Senator, a newscaster - the Moff who’d wanted to sell out, but who’d ended up shot on the way to his hearing - the prison warden, another would-be defector shot before he could give up his secrets - another Senator, three in fact, long before Senator Tai-Lin Garr had been shot down in public. It couldn’t be. It had to be. He had all those deaths memorized, all the nights _she’d_ spent up on the comms trying to sort it all out and never getting any time to mourn each new death. All the blaster holes: neat, precise and mysterious, all Sienar-Jaemus but anyone could have had a Sienar-Jaemus blaster-rifle - and who was to say it wasn’t Sienar-Jaemus itself, when the Corporate Sector’s prosperity had been so closely entwined with the rise of the Empire? But here was a list of places and one uniting fact: Chandrila. Coruscant. Pujool. Hosnian Prime. A blaster-rifle shot to the head.

“I did garotte a man once,” the the General was saying, when he zoned back in. He didn’t like the gleam in the General’s eye at all; too much like the General of his fantasy. “But that was an accident - purely the result of a terrible miscalculation on a team member’s part.”

An accident. He wondered if he could hold someone and throttle the life out of them and then call it an accident afterwards. What kind of good was that kind of killing - to pretend you weren’t responsible for it? But it wasn’t neat. It wasn’t neat at all, so maybe that was the accident; the untidiness, not the murder.

“And the team member?” he asked the General, despite the silent screamed warning that answers were dangerous, despite the inevitable answer.

( _Well we had to dispatch him, didn’t we_ , said the General in his squalid little fantasy.)

“We had to send him back to be retrained,” said the General distractedly, attention turned back to the half-completed holoimage floating over his desk - the cross-section of some kind of brand new missile to rain down on the galaxy. And then, more to himself than to him: “what the pfask is Hedy thinking?”

And here he was, kneeling on the floor, ignored for the sake of a missile, for the sake of the galaxy. His life summed up in this tiny fragging moment, in the fact that the General left his hand dangling there like he - like he was a _dog_ , an _animal_ , hunting for affection - and he was, wasn’t he? A dog searching for a leash - a leash from Mom and Dad, a leash from Snoke, a leash from the General - one for each of them and to the winner, absolute power - to fix him up and tell him just what the pfask he was. Who the pfask he was. Because kriff knew if he’d ever find the answer to the questions he had about the General and if he couldn’t managed that tiny fragging thing, how the pfask was he supposed to know who he was - if he couldn’t even interpret encrypted reports correctly without a hint, if he couldn’t even keep the General’s attention on him long enough to be _interesting_?

But he could be interesting. He could be.

“FO-275,” he said. “You were on Hosnian Prime.”

The General’s fingers went stiff under his lips.

“How do you know about FO-275?” the General demanded coolly, but his fingers were a dead giveaway.

He mouthed at the tip of the General’s index finger. “Oh you know,” he said, deliberately vague, demurely avoiding the General’s gaze. “Things - little birds -” he moved to the next finger, “I know you were a secret agent for the First Order,” he said. “And you can’t get a promotion out of being stuck on a nameless planet doing pfask-all -”

It was too much, maybe. One moment the General’s hand was limp against his mouth, the next moment, the General was holding his chin in a vice-like grip and tilting his head up forcibly.

“I’m going to ask you only once, Ren,” he said, cold and distant - not so different from Snoke, when he was displeased, which was more often than not. “How do you know about FO-275?”

He met the General’s gaze unflinchingly. He could be interesting, too. More interesting than a remote-launching missile, mostly because missiles were droids or as good as droids and he wasn’t, he was a man and he went everywhere, all directions, all at once.

“Where do you think, _General_?” he said. “I read your files, I read your emails. There isn’t anything I don’t know about you.”

And _fire_.

The General’s face went - blank. The careful absence of emotion. Perfect control, executed right from the minutiae of his facial expressions to his hand, which did not tighten and did not loosen its grip on his chin.

“You _read_ -” said the General, in a voice that was deadly calm. The only sign that the General was perturbed in any way lay in the way his fingers were drumming the desk. “ _You’re_ the leak, you read my files, my emails - on a datapad with none of the usual encryptions high command’s datapads are equipped with - and then accessed the HoloNet, with all this sensitive information _downloaded_ on to your datapad -”

“There wasn’t anything sensitive,” he said sulkily. “They weren’t even interesting.”

“Well I’m sure the Resistance’s cryptographers won’t agree with you,” the General replied acidly. “The entire Order’s been on red alert and a complete communications lockdown and the most you can say is ‘they weren’t _interesting_ ’ while heads roll over your kriffing stalkerish obsession with _me_ and your inability to ever fragging follow military protocol -”

The General reached for the comms on his desk with one hand and barked into it: “Major, yes - you can call off the lockdown now, let the rest of the Order know our networks are secure, just issue a standard warning to change passwords and the lot - just a judgement error from one of our officers - no we won’t be investigating it, best to drop the whole thing - little misunderstanding, you know how these things are - I have the situation under control - yes I’m quite sure I have the situation under control. Thank you.”

Then another call on his comms, made again, with one hand: “Turval - I’ve found the leak - no, not a public investigation - Supreme Leader’s orders, Turval, that’s why - I don’t know, that’s why I need you - to tell me where he fits in all of this - no, not right now, come around in thirty minutes - my orders, Turval, I have a feeling he’ll do better without you breathing down his neck - yes, or breaking his fingers, he won’t like that at all - thirty minutes. Thank you.”

“The loyalty officer,” he said, disdainfully. “What do you need him for?”

“You may be the Supreme Leader’s pet, _Ren_ ,” said the General. “But as far as everyone on this ship is concerned, the First Order is run by high command and if high command says that loyalty officers need to vet the loyalties of everyone aboard this ship, then the loyalty officer is damn well going to do his job and you’re going to answer his questions because on this ship, both you and I are fully at his mercy and the last thing I need is to waive an investigation into your loyalties out of some misguided idea that this would please the Supreme Leader, only for it to come and bite me in the rear later, _Ben Solo_.”

The breath caught in the back of his throat without realizing. The name was taboo. The Supreme Leader had banned it - and here the General was flaunting it so proudly - _viciously_ \- the General _knew_ , of course the General _knew_ -

“I’m not Ben Solo,” he said and his voice didn’t waver. Not one bit.

“Why did you lose time on the bridge?” said the General.

“That doesn’t concern you,” no hitch. No hitch.

“We’ll let Turval decide if it does or it doesn’t,” said the General. “If you’re a spoilt brat or a Resistance spy.”

 _Failure_ , Snoke said. _Will not be tolerated_. Or something like that. It didn’t matter now. He’d failed Snoke and he was going back to be trained. He was alive, he was living and breathing and would be alive, would keep on breathing because he couldn’t go yet, wouldn’t go yet, until they had the girl, until Skywalker was dead - but a man, just a man, even a brilliant one, was replaceable. The General could be replaced and the General knew it, why wouldn’t he? Brilliant men knew their fates, they always did. They always died, they were always replaced. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t. Not yet. The General could try, but he wasn’t irreplaceable yet.

The General had once garroted a man, an enemy. This was a fact. The other fact was that the General had choked him without warning while they were having sex. The third fact was this: the General’s hand was too close to his throat and the Force was a twisted and perverse creature, light when it should have been dark, dark when it should have been light - and maybe the General was right, because surely a man would have been able to control it - and these were the floundering mistakes of a boy - and mistakes were like bait, drew all the predatory creatures in the area to feed, hungry at the scent of blood and the General was waiting, waiting - had always been waiting - for him to make the smallest mistake - because the General would drown him, would have liked to drown him and claim he did it himself and what better way to do it than to make it look like a natural accident: just a messed up crazy kid who couldn’t handle war, who couldn’t handle the stress - because the General didn’t want to die - because no one wanted to die.

He should have known better, but he’d gone and done it and forgotten that the General was a dangerous man first and foremost, a man in charge of a crew, second and only thirdly, his co-commander and here he was, with the General’s fingers now digging in painfully into his chin - there would be bruises tomorrow, proof of his vulnerability and of all the stupid mistakes he’d made - which was what he got for being foolish, for being a stupid boy who couldn’t even get the Force right, who couldn’t even kill his own father without wanting to cry, who couldn’t even figure out what and who he was and needed someone to tell him that of the two stories about Ben Solo - the bad blood and the bad parents - it was all on Mom and Dad for failing him, even right down to the murders and all those dead kids lying in some field rotting - rotted - right down to the crazy which never changed - which never changed across these stories because in every version, he was mad mad mad mad mad - and the General’s hand was on his chin and he was kneeling and the General was a _dangerous man_.

“I’m not Ben Solo,” he repeated. And no, it shouldn’t have, but his voice caught in his throat and the words came out mangled in a half-sob - but he wasn’t - he couldn’t - not now - not now -

“Either you’re Darth Vader’s grandson,” the General said, innocently, much too innocently. “Or you’re not and you’ve been lying to us -”

The General’s fingers dug painfully into his jaw, his cheek.

“So which is it, Ben Solo?”

“I’m not Ben Solo,” he whispered. He wasn’t. Hadn’t ever been. Could’ve, but hadn’t. He’d tried it on for size and then decided he didn’t like it because - because - why - _because_ , the voice said nastily, _because you didn’t like the responsibility_. Because - because - because - he _was_ \- he _was_ Darth Vader’s grandson: strong and invulnerable and unbroken and unbeaten - he _was_ \- he _was_ \- _he was_ \- his cheeks were wet and he was crying and he was on his knees and he was _begging_ \- _begging_ \- to hide the nightmare - the _memories_ \- _the memories_ \- threatening to break through - for a man to look at him, not a missile, not the fragging missile -

He didn’t have much, but he had the General’s attention now. The General was looking at him, dark-eyed and hungry, like he could eat him whole and the grip on his chin wasn’t murderous anymore, but closer to a caress - and then the General _did_ caress him, wiped at the tears with one thumb and regarded them with a kind of perverse and scientific curiosity -

( _What do you want_? the General who wasn’t real asked him, elegantly sprawled across a bed.

 _I want_ , he’d said - in the dream. _I want you to tell me_ , was what he should have said. He knew. The only thing he knew. _I don’t know_. _Tell me_. _Everyone tells me_.)

“Fix me,” he begged, through his tears. “Please. Fix me.”

He hadn’t even noticed when the metallic taste of the General’s rage had disappeared from his mouth. The cold scientific expression faded from the General’s face and the General simply looked old and tired and as defeated as he felt.

“I can’t fix you,” he said, softly, thumb still gently wiping at the tears.

“Please,” he whispered. “You could -”

He tried to remember, later, what the General’s mouth felt like against his. Searing hot, he supposed. Soft, the way the General’s hands were soft. Soft and dangerous, as the General pressed a single kiss to his cheek, against the tears - against the tear tracks - but he couldn’t remember the particularities -  the shape of his mouth and whether or not the General’s lips were chapped or rough or if, like the rest of him, his lips were perfectly maintained, soft but dangerous: it all disappeared in a white haze, all unhappy uncertainties and dizzying heat.

“Please,” he was mouthing, when the haze faded. “Please.”

“Get up,” said the General. “Get up, get up.”

It wasn’t gentle, the way the General’s fingers dug into his arms as the General pulled him off the floor. Maybe it was gentle, the way they undressed and the way Hux pushed him backwards on to the bed and then pressed open-mouthed kisses along his collarbone and then down his chest, down his stomach. He wouldn’t know. The haze kept swelling and dissipating, like waves along the shore at Chandrila - _my love, what have I done, I’ve killed the only man I loved_ \- Ben Solo and Kylo Ren seamlessly switching places, one all fragmented memories and lies and the other all fragmented moments of the present and lies. Everywhere lies and everywhere bright and blurry, life lived on the wrong end of a pair of macrobinoculars, on the wrong end of a holodrama where Hux was sucking him first, then Hux’s voice was murmuring something about moving that he couldn’t hear, couldn’t answer, until Hux’s hands moved him, gently nudged his legs apart - until Hux’s fingers were in his mouth again and of course, this was what they were doing, they’d done it before, hadn’t they? Half an hour to determine his loyalties before he was turned over to the ship’s loyalty officer, half-an-hour to make sure he wouldn’t forget Hux, to make sure he’d lie for Hux - for Hux to show how he knew - that he’d always known - that he was dangerous, that he would carelessly throw him out an airlock if it meant he kept his head - that Hux was living, breathing, real - not a fantasy - a living, breathing man - a man he could touch - see, his abs sweating and the way the muscles in his stomach flex, the way the muscles under his arms shift and move, the locks of hair knocked loose and hanging over his forehead and his eyes, glazed and hungry - a real person, warm and sweating and vital - not cold and untouchable - that Hux would not be consumed because Hux consumed, because Hux would consume whole suns if it got him what he wanted - that he was a boy, irreplaceable, and Hux wasn’t and Hux knew and Hux hated and Hux loathed and Hux would take because Hux was selfish and cruel and hungry and Hux would drown him if he could and even the way Hux gripped his hips and the way Hux thrust into him said _I hate I hate I hate, I eat I eat I eat_ because what could you expect from a man who’d only just destroyed an entire planetary system, trillions of lives, destroyed a sun and called another - two or three - into existence on the other side of the galaxy - what could you expect from a man like that, what could you, what could you?

And this time Hux was gentle, as though he was fragile and breakable and even though there would be bruises tomorrow, ugly purple things along his hips, along his thighs - along the inside of his thighs from where Hux’s mouth had been - Hux didn’t put his hands around his neck and choke him, leaned down and kissed his neck instead - and yes, Hux’s mouth was soft and warm and it could be so easy - it could have been so easy to believe that Hux was just this and forget the way Hux pinned his wrists above his head - the way Hux held too tight and the way it _hurt_ , the way he wanted to say _it hurts_ but which would mean _please stop_ and he didn’t want that, because he was close now, so close to knowing - so close to understanding -

(Did Hux listen to the holorags? Did Hux know what they said about him? Did Hux know they’d called him crazy? Did Hux know they’d called Ben Solo crazy? Did Hux know they’d called Ben Solo a wild child, problem child, bad kid, every kind of name you could call a kid short of calling him a bastard? Did Hux know they’d though he’d been sent away for his health? Did Hux know all the stories about _them_ ? Did Hux believe the stories that said _they_ were the ones who did this or the ones that said it was all bad blood and Vader, too much Vader? Did Hux think he was like Vader? Did Hux think about him at all? Did anyone think about him at all? Was he just a footnote? Was he just a footnote?)

Hux leaned down and whispered in his ear, breathy and warm (and here were his wrists, being held down by Hux’s right hand while his left hand stroked him, slow like a caress, like the way Hux had wiped his tears with his thumb): “Stop it. You’re overthinking it. Just - relax - be - in the moment - be here, with me. Stay with me. Stay with me.”

 _Stay with me_ . _Stay. With. Me._

He wondered if being put back together with a welding torch hurt like this. Felt as good as this. If it was all white lights and bright and sent every bit of him shattering - flying across the room in tiny, tiny pieces - like this did and if it meant he could dig his fingernails into Hux’s back and hear Hux breathe a single _pfask_ , before tensing - if it meant Ben Solo and Kylo Ren were both swallowed by the fierce white haze in which time stopped and space stopped and everything stopped, before it all started again and it was just him, just him and Hux inside him and everything was sharper and brighter and clearer and richer than it had ever been: the cold metallic glare of the insides of the _Finalizer_ , the freckles on Hux’s shoulders, the split ends in his hair, his breath - warm and humid - ghosting along his neck, the warm and limp weight of Hux’s body, the sharp and solid feel of Hux’s shoulder blades - his spine, each vertebrae - the way the sheets were half tangled around his legs, the sweat plastering his hair to his forehead, the warm sweaty feel of the synthcloth sheets - fine and a thread count you’d find in a luxurious hotel on an Inner Rim world like Chandrila - the little groan Hux made as he pulled out, the way he could feel Hux’s muscles flex against his skin before Hux moved away, the rough feel of the washcloth against his belly - each individual thread - Hux’s mouth pressing kisses against his shoulder and Hux’s long fingers lightly skimming along his chest - everything crystal sharp and bright and brilliant, before it began to fade back into the white haze, all gluey and sticky and foggy -

“- Chandrila,” he heard the General say as he pulled on a jacket, when the haze finally lifted. “Not Hosnian Prime.”

Chandrila. The engineer lying in his puddle of blood and Admiral Antilles trying to keeep the crowd from starting a stampede in a panic. Dad swinging him off the ground and putting an arm around Mom - shaking, eyes scarily blank. Mon Mothma, tall and regal and ghostly, unnaturally white. Uncle Chewie towering behind them and bellowing something. Dad saying _come on, let’s get you out of here_ \- and Mom saying _Han we can’t just leave_. And the engineer lying on the ground, the ground staining a dark red. And the engineer lying on the ground, with his brains spilled out everywhere.

“Chandrila,” he said faintly.

The nightmare was real.  

“I was a very good shot,” the General replied, wry and his mouth quirking up in that half smile of his.

Fifteen. The General would have been fifteen on Chandrila. Fifteen and hidden away inside a building somewhere, watching their every move. Fifteen and noting every single man in plain clothes who stood out like a sore thumb. Fifteen and counting the faces: Leia Organa, Mon Mothma, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Wedge Antilles, Lando Calrissian, the old Twi’lek, soldiers, soldiers fragging everywhere, too straightbacked and alert to really be marketgoers. A single nameless boy. An engineer. The engineer, lying on the ground, eyes unseeing and blood absolutely everywhere and he thought: _looks like hot sauce_ . The engineer, with his brains spilled everywhere. Absolutely fragging everywhere. It was all real, it was all real, the nightmare was real - _what the pfask is Hedy thinking_ ? the General had said - and now Chandrila - which meant - which meant - _which meant_ -

The doors to the General’s quarters slid open soundlessly.

“He’s all yours,” the General said. “Good luck.”

 

\--

 

**vii.**

There are lies and lies and lies but there is a fact and this fact remains a constant across space across time: he is the grandson of Darth Vader and the Force runs strong in him like it used to in his grandfather. There are many many stories about his grandfather and what he did - the cruelties, the atrocities, the heroism, the fall, the rise. All of them conflicting, some of them true, some of them mythical. There is one fact which remains the same, though, and that is that Darth Vader killed his master. Snoke called it a mistake, a momentary lapse of reason. Luke Skywalker said it was the moment when Darth Vader became Anakin Skywalker again and came back to the light, for the sake of his son. Stories changed. The fact stayed the same. Darth Vader - Anakin Skywalker - his grandfather, killed his master, which is to say, Darth Vader is a traitor and Darth Vader’s blood runs strong in his veins and the Force runs strong and treacherous in him the way it once did in his grandfather and in the history of things, there are more facts, moments, which all reinforce this singular truth: that the apprentice one day supplants the master, that the apprentice turns on the master - because the dark side of the Force is a slippery, treacherous thing, and his grandfather’s blood runs strong in his veins and he is a traitor --

 

( _I don’t think he understands what I’m saying_ , says Turval, the loyalty officer. It sounds like he’s on the wrong end of a loudhailer, small and faraway, but the shadows falling across the bed tell him otherwise. _Can we charge him, if he’s like this?_

 _He understands_ , says the General. _He understands perfectly well_.

 _I’m sick_ , he wants to say. It doesn’t come out. The shadows loom over him and the binders slip over his wrists before he can feel the Force and when the Force comes, it says: _yes_.

Just yes. _Yes_. _Yes._ Take him away. Lock him up. _Yes_.

 _Kylo Ren_ , Turval intones, _you are charged with committing treason against the Supreme Leader and the Union of Free Planets under the FIrst Order, for the wilful sabotage Order operations on behalf of a terrorist organization, leaking sensitive information classified under the tenth and eleventh clauses of the Official Secrets Act to the enemy and deliberately causing a security breach in the Order's encrypted high-security networks with the intent of creating an entry point for the terrorist organization known as 'the Resistance' led by General Organa - your mother._ )

 

(“This is not your legacy,” says Snoke. “This is not the truth of your family.”

 _Either you’re Darth Vader’s grandson_ , says the General. _Or you aren’t_.

“There is no rule of two,” says Snoke.

“You do not know, do not understand the dark side,” says Snoke.

 _Don’t overthink it_ , says the General. _Just be - in the moment_.

“We are not the Sith,” says Snoke.

His fear tastes like the noxious fumes of the Kessel mines, bitter and sickly sweet on his tongue.

“How convenient,” he says, to the empty room, to the broken body and the blood pooling at his feet.)

 

\-- his grandfather’s blood runs strong in his veins and he is a traitor and he is mad mad mad. Skywalker madness. This is why he is alone on a ghost ship, drifting through space. The psytechs visit twice a day. The General visits once. The General is very kind, asks him how he is and he always says _fine_ , and never asks what’s going on outside, what happens beyond space. The General saved him, you see. They would have executed him - he is a traitor, traitors are executed, that is a fact - only the General said he was a man possessed, a sick man who had to be pitied and anyway, weren’t they all better off without Snoke and his terrible tactical decisions? And they’d all agreed with the General. Better to carry on efficiently, with a leader who understood long term military strategy and progress - not by the strange and unruly superstitions of the Force, but by intelligent and brilliant men who used to replaceable but aren’t anymore.

The General is irreplaceable now. The General kisses him. They are lovers, maybe. He can’t always tell. His body feels so alien all the time. He feels so faraway and distant, except when everything goes white and explodes: the only time the world feels present and now and his body tingles like it’s a living thing. Somewhere beyond the bounds of this room he’s in there are people, people doing things, living lives, fighting wars, but they don’t concern him anymore. None of this concerns him anymore. He is Darth Vader’s grandson and Darth Vader was a traitor, Darth Vader murdered his master - and then died. No more facts, just stories. Myths. Just him, on a ghost ship, while everyone scurries around and continues their war. A crazy kid sent away for his ‘health’, sent to a starship that’s miles long and has enough firepower to besiege a planet on its own to recover, for his health. A war rages below him. People are dying. People are being murdered by this ship. But he’s here for his health. He was sent away for his health. This is his sanatorium and what a sanatorium it is. And what a sanatorium. What a kriffing sanatorium.

**Author's Note:**

>  **further warnings:** most of this fic takes place inside Kylo Ren's mind and shifts seamlessly between reality, the present, the past and the fake. Most of this fic is a creation of Kylo Ren's mind and an unhealthy coping mechanism more than actual events happening. There are actions, however, which are real and manipulative on both Hux  & Snoke's part, proceed with caution etc. There are graphic descriptions of violence and murder that Kylo Ren imagines occurring to other people but also serves as a sublimated form of self-harm in that Kylo Ren imagines this violence being inflicted on him as a mixture of both hate and 'kindness'. Most of these descriptions of violence to Kylo Ren specifically are false and exist purely in Kylo Ren's fantasy except for a single moment of action at the beginning and right at the end, HOWEVER, some of the action that takes place, especially towards the end, involves Kylo Ren's fantasies being strongly interwoven with memories/flashbacks from his childhood. The dubious consent tag covers three moments: two where Kylo Ren consents to sex with Hux but is dissociating or does not explicitly consent to all the acts but goes along with it and one half non-sexual moment in which a graphic and quasi-sexual murder is narrated to Kylo Ren in a fantasy/nightmare. The ableism tag is used because of the frank discussion of eugenics that occurs about halfway through the fic & the institutionalization tag is for a media discussion that takes place wrt Ben Solo's disappearance.
> 
> Again, if you feel anything needs to be tagged please let me know and I will absolutely tag it. 
> 
> The songs used here are references to the murder ballads _Banks Of The Ohio_ and _Mack the Knife_ , but like, Star Wars-ified.
> 
> Feel free to come talk to me about this/come chat either in the comments or on [tumblr](http://tobermoriansass.tumblr.com/) if that's your thing.


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